 This is a really important weekend for us. This is our big give weekend. We do this every year. This is when we start our big give project. The majority of what goes into our big give offering will take place this weekend, but there's, you know, some of it will continue to come for the next couple of weeks. At the end of services today, we will receive the big give offering that's gonna go towards both local and global partners. And it is, it's not just money that we're giving. What we are doing is fueling the gospel flame to the ends of the nations, to the ends of the earth. And just to give you an example of where this is going, Pastor Joel who loves doing video, he's so excited every time we invite him to do a video for our radiant news. He actually hates it, but we make him do it. He was telling me before the service that just our partner in Egypt that needs new bikes, that we're hoping that even if we have an overage above our million dollar campaign, we'll be able to help him. But just this month, he will have baptized a thousand Muslims who have received Jesus as Lord and Savior in Egypt. I want you to think about that right now. A thousand Muslims. It's a big deal when a Muslim comes to faith in Christ, the Son of God, and gets baptized, especially in a primarily Muslim nation. That's just one of our partners that globally you guys give to every single month. And so when we're able to add fuel to the gospel flame, wherever it's at in the world, it brings incredible fruit and glory to God. And so we're thankful for you and you've been praying about that. We'll receive that at the end of the service today. But before we do that, I wanna bring a message to you. We're calling this an Advent series, but Advent actually begins next weekend. But I wanted to get a jumpstart on it because we're gonna do some really special things leading up to Christmas with our kids and families. But I wanna begin a series called Prepare the Way of the Lord. And I wanna invite you to open your Bibles to Isaiah chapter 40. And if you're really clever and you have your Bibles, you can also put a marker in Mark chapter one. How many have brought your Bibles to church this morning? Let me see the Bible roll call, I love that. I love that. How many have it on your digital device? Hold it up. I love that. How many have it memorized? And so you didn't even need to bring it. Just go ahead and raise your hand. We honor you as well. Scriptures are gonna come up on the screens here. But I wanna begin by reading these two verses this morning. Isaiah chapter 40, beginning verse number three. It says, A voice cries out in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up and every mountain and hill will be made low. The uneven ground shall become level and the rough places a plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. And then Mark chapter one, beginning in verse number one. It says the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God. As it is written in Isaiah the prophet, Behold I send my messenger before your face who will prepare your way. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the Lord, make his path straight. John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And all the country of Judea and of the Jordan and Jerusalem were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the river Jordan confessing their sins. And now John was clothed with camel's hair and wore a leather belt around his waist and he ate wild locus and honey. And he preached saying, after me comes one who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and to untie. I have baptized you with water but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit. Would you join me in prayer this morning? Father we thank you for your word and we ask you today by the power of your Holy Spirit would you come and would you breathe life on your word and speak to our hearts. Lord I'm praying that we would have ears to hear what you are saying to us individually and what you're saying to the church, your body during this period of time in which we find ourselves and leading up to Christmas. Lord we don't wanna just go through the motions but we want to have our hearts truly prepared for you. And only you can do that Lord. Only your Holy Spirit can put the plow in to the fallow ground of our heart and turn it over and make it ready to receive your word. And so we ask you to do that today in Jesus' name. Amen. Prepare the way of the Lord. You know what's interesting about how God works. You can find it from Genesis all the way through the end of the Bible and also throughout God's redemptive history is that before God reveals himself or before he reveals himself makes himself manifest in history. He always calls his people to prepare themselves. Before God reveals himself he calls his people, that's us, to prepare themselves. It's oftentimes you might run into a skeptic or an agnostic or even an atheist and say well if God's really there I wish that he would just show himself. And that's actually a very foolhardy thing to say because if God truly were to reveal himself it would not be him revealing himself like a man reveals himself. It wouldn't be him stepping from behind a tree or stepping from behind a wall or pulling off some veil and just going surprise, here I am. Surprise, surprise, you know like the meme demonstrates it wouldn't be like that. For us to see God as he really is is more than we can take. The Bible is very clear in Malachi it says that when he comes the day of the Lord who can endure it? Because he comes like a refiner's fire. He comes like soap, like this cleansing flame and soap that strips everything else away. Our God is a consuming fire. And when you see times in the Old Testament where God revealed himself just a little bit like when he revealed himself to Moses and the children of Israel on Mount Sinai. It says that he was shrouded in a cloud but yet still his glory just about wiped them all out. And he told them don't touch the mountain because it's holy unto the Lord. There has to be a separation between who God is and who we are. And the reason for that is God is holy and we are sinful. And so for us to say God show yourself, reveal yourself to us. It's an awesome and an awful thing. But yet God does it and God reveals himself. And oftentimes when God comes and we use that language, God coming or making himself revealed or manifest to us. Obviously we know God is everywhere all at the same time but God oftentimes will take up a manifestation to reveal himself and to draw near to his people. When he does that, when God reveals himself, he does it in two distinct ways. God reveals himself in mercy and he reveals himself in judgment. And very graciously of God, before he reveals himself in judgment, he always offers himself in mercy. In Habakkuk chapter three, verse one, the prophet calls upon God and he says, in your judgment, remember also mercy. This is how God reveals himself in mercy where God will raise up and send a prophetic voice out in front of him to revive the hearts of his people and to remind them of who he is, to remind them of his covenant, to remind them of his tender mercies, to remind them of his goodness, to call them back to a first love commitment to the covenant that God has given to us. So the Old Testament is full of God raising up prophets, sending them to his people and calling them to repentance and saying, restore your heart, restore your relationship with God, renew yourself back to the commands of God lest he come in judgment. But the second way that he reveals himself is judgment. Make no mistake about it. When God's voice has been ignored, his holiness of purpose must be justified and enacted upon. Now, God always offers mercy before judgment, but judgment is a very real part of who God is. To the believer and to his people, judgment is corrective. God is bringing pressure that he applies to his people. In fact, Peter later on in his epistle says that judgment always begins with the house of God. Before God judges a nation, he will always judge his people or the church. When he brings judgment upon the church or his people, his covenant people, it's always corrective. It's like a parent who has warned his children time and time again to come into a line with the rules and come into alignment and stop being rebellious and stop being disobedient and stop disregarding me as a parent. But there comes a point when every parent has to then back that up with correction or discipline. This is how God judges his people. And he'll always judge the people of God first, but judgment will also come to those who ignore him and nations that ignore him and cultures that ignore him. And in those cases, God's judgment is punitive. And it's very in vogue right now to talk about the God of love without also talking about the God of justice. It's very in vogue to talk about how God is kind and gracious and merciful, but very rarely do you ever hear about the judgments of God. It's been said Leonard Ravenhill said it years ago that if God does not judge America, and I truly believe that God would be very justified in judging our nation for our national sins, that if God does not judge America, he would have to judge, he would have to apologize, Sodom and Gomorrah. Because he brought judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah and you can see throughout the Old Testament the list of nations that God has judged. And what we also know is that at the end of the age, when Jesus does return, I know we've been talking about that for several weeks, but it's very connected to the overall gospel that when he does return at whatever point that he does, there is going to be a ultimate judgment in which God judge individuals, but he also judges nations. He talks about separating the sheep from the goats. That's God judging the nations. So when God reveals himself, he reveals himself in mercy, but also in judgment before he comes. And before Jesus came in his first coming, as the son of God, Emmanuel, the incarnation, the messenger of mercy and salvation, before Jesus was manifest to the world, God sent a messenger, John the baptizer. And so that's what we describe in Isaiah. He's prophesying this some five, 600 years ahead of time. He's like, before my son comes, before the Messiah comes, I'm gonna send a messenger, a voice in the wilderness, a forerunner, one who's gonna go out in advance and his job is to prepare the way. To prepare the way for the Lord. Before Jesus comes, the forerunner is gonna go out ahead and he's gonna block and he's gonna straighten and he's gonna raise up, he's gonna elevate. John the Baptist is this wild voice out in the wilderness that we read about that is so counter cultural to everything else around him. He's a forerunner, but he's also a Nazarite. You can read about the qualifications of a Nazarite in Numbers chapter six, but there are three criteria for someone who makes a Nazarite vow. Number one is they will never cut their hair. You might think of Samson, who was a Nazarite. His strength was in his hair. It wasn't in his hair, it was in his commitment and his vow connected to not cutting his hair. You know, sometimes your teenager might come home and say, I'm growing my hair out, it's actually a Nazarite vow. No, it's probably just because they wanna be a little wild and they wanna grow their hair out, but if you were gonna be a Nazarite, you make the commitment, you're not gonna cut your hair. Number two is you will drink no fruit of the vine, no wine, eat no grapes, no nothing. You're gonna abstain from that all the days of your life. And then the third criteria is to have no contact with the dead, with dead things, no carcass, not even to close the eyelids on your father or your mother on their deathbed. And so John the Baptist is this first cousin of Jesus. He's a prophet, but he's also from the priestly lineage of his father, Zachariah, who serves in the temple. But instead of serving the nation and the people of God by going into the temple, he actually is driven out into the wilderness where he is developed and strengthened and he comes into a fullness of his calling alone out in the wilderness as a prophet, in the spirit of Elijah. When Luke is describing it, it says in Luke chapter one, verse 16 through 17, that he, talking about John the Baptist, he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God and he will go before him, that's talking about Jesus, in the spirit and the power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the father to the children and the disobedient to wisdom of the just and to make ready for the Lord a people prepared. So John's job was to prepare the people of God to receive Jesus, the son of God, when he comes on the scene, to prepare them and to prepare their hearts. In other words, he's going out ahead of time and he's like, wake up, God's about to move into history. God is about to release his redemptive purposes in the earth. This is a time unlike any other time. This is not time to just live status quo, dull, you know, with your ears stopped, this is a time to think and a time to repent and to get ready because God is about to come to you. And that was John's whole ministry, was to prepare the people of God. When you think about John's message, John's message as a prophet was a revolution unto repentance. That's what he did. It was a revolution he was calling the community of faith and the people of Israel to prepare their hearts and to actually go through a revolution that was centered around repentance. That's what he did. He went out into the wilderness, but at some point the Holy Spirit spoke to him and said, it's time. And John began to baptize at the Jordan River and call people to repentance. Matthew three, verses one through two says, in those days John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea. Here was this message, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. In other words, what he's saying is, it's about to happen. You're living in a moment when God is about to come to you, step into history and begin to shift history for his purposes. It's time for you to repent. And then in verse four it says, it describes John, it says he wore a garment of camel's hair, a leather belt around his waist and his food was locus and wild honey. Then Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region about the Jordan were going out to him and they were baptized by him in the Jordan River confessing their sins. So here he is, he's this forerunner, this Elijah who shows up on the scene. He's a prophet, he's a priest. He's a Nazarite, but he's strange. And he's totally out of sync with just the current flow of how culture is going. But he begins to preach and to proclaim a message of revolution, of change, of repentance. And he stands out as a prophetic signpost and he gets people's attention. How many know it's oftentimes the strange things that get people's attention? If everything is normal, if everything just blends in, if everything is camouflaged in culture, nobody pays attention to it. The way that you get a platform in social media terms is you have to stand out and so everybody's trying to find their niche. Everybody's trying to find their lane. Everybody's trying to get attention and that's really difficult to do in a distracted world that we live in where we've got 24 hour entertainment and news cycles and screens and scrolling and voices and satellites and travel and we're connected to more people. Listen, we're connected to more voices than any other generation, but we hear less. It's because it's all become noise. In the midst of that noise, oftentimes God will speak through a prophet or a prophetic message or a prophetic voice that seems so out of kilter. It just seems so strange and so wild. Think about the day of Pentecost. Here they are in Jerusalem in an upper room and God pours out his spirit on 120 in an upper room and what do they do? They begin to speak in tongues as the Holy Spirit gives them utterance and what happens? Everybody from the city comes and gathers around and says, what is this? Do you think that was accidental? No, it was God getting their attention and it was no different than this guy, John the baptizer. And normally we call him John the Baptist, but when we say that in our terms, people immediately think, well, yeah, obviously John's a Baptist. We're all, you know, everybody who loves Jesus is a Baptist. That's like, you know, what about the Christian reform and the non-denominational people? But when you begin to turn it on its head a little bit and you say, John the baptizer, it describes who he was and what he did. He's this odd guy out in the wilderness and if you really break it down, think about it. He lives in the wilderness. If you've ever been to Israel and you've seen the Judean wilderness, it's not woods and jungle, it's just tan, rolling desert hills and caves. And that's where John has lived the majority of his life out there by himself in isolation. He lives in the wilderness, not in the stream of society. Why? It's because God wanted to shape him. Think about all the years that John was in relationship with God. He was in fellowship with him and in his word, in a place of isolation and prayer, outside of normal streams of society. He's not influenced by the voices. He's not influenced by the styles. He's not influenced by the populace of what they think he's learned to hear one voice and to hear it very clearly. John wore uncomfortable garments when he could have worn the comfort and the luxury of priestly garments. If you've ever read the book of Exodus and you've read the Old Testament, the garments that the priest wore were intricate and luxurious and filled with gold and fine linens and stones on the ephod, a precious, even gold all over them. But John, who's of a priestly lineage, who has every right to do that, chooses the most uncomfortable thing that you could wear, camel hair, garments, and a leather belt. I mean, this is a wild looking dude. And he's wearing just the most. If you've ever worn a wool sweater without a T-shirt underneath it, and you just, it's like, man, this thing is hot and warm, but it's scratchy, itchy, imagine camel, camel hair. He's wearing this, it's uncomfortable. He's out in the wilderness. He's living in caves. In other words, he chooses his calling over his comfort and he lives on a diet of living things versus dead and decaying things. This is why he eats honey. Do you know that honey never dies? You can, they've actually taken honey that they found in jars in Pharaoh's pyramids that are 3,500 years old and they put it into boiling water and it reconstitutes. It never goes bad. It never rots. It's never dead. It's the perfect food. It's not dead. It's not decaying locus. He's not killing things in order to eat them. I mean, he's just filling his mouth up with grasshoppers. Nasty. Saw somebody recently, some celebrity who is trying to convince us all that we should all eat more insects to get protein and I don't care how famous or how beautiful you are, it just looks terrible to see somebody sticking a grasshopper in their mouth. This is tasty. Every time I see that, I think of John the Baptist walking around the wilderness, talking to God, wearing camel skin, leather belt, eating grasshoppers and with a honey bear, squeezing it into his mouth and just like, how did you live on that? But he's living on these living things. He's not feasting on the dead things. And what's interesting about John is when he baptizes, his ministry is taking place on the east side of the Jordan. It's the wilderness side of the Jordan. It's not the Israel side of the Jordan. Why is that significant? Because the very spot that John is baptizing on the east side of the Jordan river is the very place where Joshua gathered the people of Israel together to consecrate themselves before they crossed the Jordan and entered into the Promised Land in fulfillment of God's covenant promises. They prepared themselves on the east side of the Jordan and then Joshua with the priests, carrying the ark, stepped into the Jordan that then parted and they walked through into the Promised Land and began to conquer and take possession of all that God had given to them. And so why is John ministering on the other side of the Jordan? It's because he's calling them to remember who they are and to remember the promises that God has made and the covenant vows that they have made to God. Remember, the only reason you're in the land is because of God's miraculous intervention. Remember that you all made vows and God offered you supernatural blessing and protection as long as you were faithful to him. But he said, if you ever go after the gods of these people and if you ever turn your heart away from me, judgment will come. And this is what John the Baptist is reminding them of. He's saying to them, you need to go back to your first love, back to where this all started and you need to repent again. Baptizing them in the Jordan River was like them passing again through the waters of God making a way and them repenting and saying, God, you are faithful, we're not. And then ultimately John the Baptist is announcing the nearness of the coming of the kingdom. He's like, the kingdom of God is at hand. It's imminent. The Lord is about to suddenly come. This is how Malachi phrases it. He says, the day of the Lord, who can endure it? It's like a fuller soap. It's like a refiner's fire. He says, but behold, the Lord is suddenly going to appear in his temple. He's suddenly gonna show up. You ever wanna do a cool study, go through the Bible and read all the sudden leads because that's how it appears where God just suddenly steps in. That's what John the Baptist is trying to get across to them is this is an urgent hour. This is not time to think, well, I've got lots and lots of time. Someday at the end of my life, I'm gonna get right with God. No, John the Baptizer is saying, no, right now, the kingdom of God is about to break in. The king is about to show up. Everything's about to change. You need to come back to where this whole thing started. You need to repent of your sin. You need to get your heart back to its first love and walk in your truest identity. And it took God raising up this wild revolutionary named John, Yohannin, who's looks strange and he's out of sorts. He's counter cultural. He's wild. He doesn't care what people think. I mean, he even confronts kings. He confronts those in powerful positions and he's proclaiming, he's like, get ready, get ready. He's coming, says in Matthew 3 verse 11 and 12. He says, I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I. This is what he's setting up, whose sandals I'm not worthy to carry. I will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire, but his winnowing fork is in his hands and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. This is John saying, it's mercy or judgment. It's mercy or it's judgment, but make no mistake about it. God is about to come. He's not gonna wait any longer. God is stepping into history and he's manifesting himself. It's either gonna be his glory unto mercy or his glory unto judgment. What you do in this moment will determine how he finds you. And when I think about Isaiah 40 and how John is the fulfillment of that, I can't help but also believe and recognize that we the church of Jesus Christ right now are living in one of these same moments. I hear the Lord saying to his church, it's mercy or it's judgment. This is nothing new. This is how God often works. We can even take a look at the history of what we call revivals. You know, there's about seven major revivals in the Old Testament where God sent a prophet, Israel turned their hearts, like during the time of Josiah and God brought a renewed sense of his glory. Hezekiah prays and God extends his life for 15 years. Multiple different occasions like that. On into the New Testament where we see even Peter standing up and saying, repent of your sins and be baptized so that God might send times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord. And on into church history, you look at the revival history of our own nation right now. And you look at the first grade awakening in America. And you look at the second grade awakening in America and the Pentecostal outpouring of the early 19th century, the evangelical missionary movements of the mid 20th century, the evangelical awakenings, the Jesus revival. And on and on and on and on. What very oftentimes happen is God will get ahold of a forerunner. Somebody who has this prophetic instinct who is not content with status quo Christianity recognizes the coldness of the church's heart and God gets ahold of this one or maybe two or a group of people and they begin to proclaim, prepare the way for the Lord. Make every valley raised up, lower every mountain, straighten every crooked path because the Lord is coming. The Lord wants to come. And what they pick up on is a sense that there is an intersection up ahead. And we're either gonna turn into God's mercy and experience His glory and His coming and His presence to renew us and refresh us and to re-store our hearts back to New Testament Christianity or God is gonna come in judgments. And we've seen, that's what revivals are, is when God will raise up these voices, whether it's a couple of intercessors in the Hebrides of Scotland or whether it's a man named Evan Roberts during the Welsh revival or whether it's a man named William J. Seymour during the Azusa outpouring or whether you can go on and on a Jonathan Edwards, a Charles Finney, it doesn't matter. God will raise up these forerunners, in the spirit of Elijah, these prophets, these preachers or these people who are not content and know what's up ahead and they begin to cry out, God, we want to prepare the way because we want your mercy. And the message is always the same. It's a message of repentance. Now, when I say repentance, immediately we start thinking of all kinds of different things about repentance. You know, repent, you think of the guy on the street corner, the wild one with his picketing sign, calling the world to repent or the billboard in King James English that says repent of your sin. And it's always this negative connotation, but can I tell you that repentance is not a bad word, but it's actually an invitation. It's God's mercy. It's him offering his mercy to us as an invitation because the word repentance doesn't mean to be humiliated. It doesn't mean just even godly sorrow. It actually means a conversion or a change in the way that we think. It's the word Greek word metnoia and it literally means to turn, to shift and to have a change in our paradigms and our way of thinking. And it's always based on the kindness of God. Romans chapter two, verse three says, or do you presume on the riches of his kindness? That's the mercy of God. And the forbearance and patience. That's the mercy of God, not knowing that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance. But because of your hard and impenitent heart, you are storing up wrath, that's judgment, for yourself on the day of wrath when God's righteous judgments will be revealed. Do you notice how he's inviting us? He's like, listen, I don't wanna bring correction. I don't wanna bring judgment. I want you to repent. I want you to change. I want you to think about this morning and we're gonna talk more about this in the weeks to come. But what does it mean in our lives individually and what does it mean for the church, God's people, to allow his spirit to convict us in a way that we lift up every valley? See, a valley are the low points, the lowest points. What are the valleys in our life that are the places that the shadows of the mountains around us cover with darkness constantly in a way that we actually have just become okay with the fact that I've got this sin, this low point, this hidden in darkness thing in my life and that's just who I am. What if this morning God was giving you an invitation and actually giving you the ability to see that low place raised up? What does it mean to lower every mountain in every hill and to bring it down, make it prepared for the Lord? What are the areas of pride and self-sufficiency and independence and rebellion that we have in our lives where we say, God, I've got this or I don't really need you or I'm gonna withhold from you and in our pride, we say to God, I've got this, this is mine and I'm not surrendering that. What does it mean for that high place? High places historically were places where idols were worshiped and they still are. What does it mean for the crooked places in our life to be made straight? What are the beliefs and the lies? What are the paradigms about what's important, about who we are, about truth, about righteousness that have been made crooked because we've lived in the current of culture and we have been raised up in this world and it takes a voice coming out of the wilderness. It takes a voice reminding us of what God has done for us and if he'll do it once, he's able to do it again and to straighten those crooked places in our lives. See, repentance invites us into God's kingdom and invites us to be prepared to receive his kingdom in a, listen, in a very real way. I believe we are in an hour in the church of shifting and sifting. I think the threshing floor of the church in America and in the West, God is sifting us. He's bringing things to the surface. Church leaders are being confronted. Sin is being revealed. Old paradigms and ways of doing things that were compromised. The pressure that's being applied to the church is revealing all of our valleys and our mountaintops and our crooked places. But he's not doing it to bring judgment of destruction upon us. He's doing it to bring the judgment of correction in his mercy to restore us and that's on a corporate level. It's on an individual level and it's because God wants us to be prepared for his coming. Whether it's him coming ultimately to reign and to rule or whether it's his coming by his Holy Spirit in which he sends seasons of refreshing and revival and renewing. That can happen in your life. That can happen to his church. If there's ever been an hour where the world needs a church that is refined and renewed in our commitment to the Lord, carrying his glory, it is this hour. This is an urgent hour in the nations and here. And just like John the Baptist was a voice in the wilderness saying, prepare the way. I hear the voice of the Holy Spirit saying to his church, prepare the way. Get ready. There's an urgency in what God is doing. Repentance is an invitation of us to change and to begin to think like God thinks and it's also an invitation for God to come in power and in glory in revival and transformation. That's my prayer. My prayer is that we won't just step into this season that we're in, it's not just a Christmas season. We're in a season that's bigger than just a season. We're in an era church in which the Holy Spirit is saying I want to renew and reform and bring a renaissance to my church to prepare it to be a carrier of my glory because the hour is late, judgment is imminent, but mercy and revival and awakening will take place if my people will turn their hearts back towards me. And I pray that we would be people to have ears to hear and eyes to see what God is doing and to respond by going back to the waters of the Jordan which for us is where we first entered into a relationship with Him and allow Him to cleanse us and to prepare us and to make us vessels of honor. That's what God wants to do. And I wanna pray over us, would you, wherever you're at, would you, you don't have to stand up, but you can take this moment and just make this a place before the Lord. Father, we stand before you as your people and oh, how we want you to come in glory, come in power. Lord, we've heard of your great power. We've heard all the accounts of how you've moved. We know how you've intervened in history and we know that you are sovereign and you are holy and before you right now, in response to your kindness, we ask that, Lord, you would grant us repentance. Lord, that you would grant us repentance on an individual level. Today, I'm praying that each and every one of us would respond to that call to prepare the way. In us, God, in me, the mountains, the valleys, the crooked places, Lord, the voice of your Holy Spirit, the conviction of the Holy Spirit. Lord, would you bring us into a place of repentance where we say, I need to get ready because God is about to move and only you can bring correction and I submit to your hand. Lord, renew in me a right spirit. Renew my mind to your word and your truth. Awaken my heart to see through the lens of your holiness and your kingdom. Lord, if that's our prayer, you will respond. And Lord, we pray for the church that bears your name, that you purchased with your own blood. Lord, we stand as a church praying for the church that in this hour, we would not resist you and put up our cackles and somehow be defensive. But Lord, we would be humble before you and say, God, do what you need to do on the threshing floor of your church to prepare us for the hour that is coming. That is the great and the awful day of the Lord. God, we know difficult days are coming, glorious days are coming and we will step into one or the other depending on how we respond to your voice. I'm praying for every person today, Lord. His heart has become hard that you would give us soft hearts again. Today, if you hear the voice of the Lord, do not harden your heart as in the day of rebellion. Lord, today, give us soft, give us pliable hearts to respond to you. Lord, I'm praying for those who are far from you that you would convict and draw them to you and those who bear your name, Lord, that we would be revived in our first love for you. Lord, help us to prepare the way for your coming and for your goodness and for your glory in Jesus' name. Amen, amen. I'm gonna invite at all of our locations, our ushers are gonna move into place. And this morning, we're gonna receive our big gift offering and I wanna invite you to prepare your giving for that. I want you to give as the Lord has led you as you prayed about it. And you might think to yourself, okay, well, what's the connection between preparing the way for the Lord and the big gift offering? What's the connection there? I want you to know these two things are not distinct. Listen, if we really believe we are those who are living in a moment where the ends of the age have come upon us and the glory of God wants to cover the earth like the waters cover the sea, then one of the ways that we return back to the Lord is by prioritizing the things that God prioritizes and God prioritizes the nations of the earth. The unreached people groups and those who right now need to hear the gospel or need encouragement or strengthening the church, that's what the big gift offering is gonna do. And so we're just grateful ahead of time for the opportunity, the invitation to give into what God cares about. He really does. And so we're gonna pray and we're gonna receive the big gift offering, then we're gonna worship and then we're gonna give opportunity for us to respond to what the Holy Spirit may be saying to us today and to receive prayer before we go. But Lord, today we thank you for your heart, for the nations. We are here because Jesus, you are Lord of the nations and you died for the sins of the whole world. And Jesus, you, the Lamb of God are worthy to receive the rewards of your suffering. And I pray today that we would not just prepare our own hearts but we would prepare the way for the gospel to go forward into every nation, to every people group and to all the unreached and to strengthen and encourage and to save in Jesus' name, amen.