Back To The First

Losing your first love rarely happens all at once. It happens in small compromises, quiet pride, and a faith that knows the right words but forgets the Person behind them. We open Revelation 2:4–5 and let it read us: God’s complaint is simple and piercing, you don’t love Me or each other like you used to, and if that doesn’t change, the lampstand (the church’s light) is at risk.

From there, we kick off a new series called “Back to the First,” using an unexpected throwback to make the point stick. Remember VHS tapes, Blockbuster, and the rule that you rewind all the way to the start? That’s the spiritual metaphor: mature Christians can get stale, bitter, complacent, and self-righteous, and the way back is not pretending we’re fine. The way back is rewinding to the first works, the humble prayers, the real repentance, the sincere love, the obedience that actually does something.

We also talk about spiritual maturity and why knowledge without humility can damage your witness. We challenge the idea that we only need to pray for others but never need prayer ourselves, and we call the church to self-examination, reconciliation, and a “do” mentality that produces real results. You’ll also hear a practical daily reset: five minutes of prayer, five minutes in the Word, five minutes of praise, one act of faith, and one invitation to church.

If you want a faith that stays warm, honest, and alive, press play, then share this with a friend who needs a reset. Subscribe, leave a review, and tell us what “first work” you’re going back to this week.

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Transcript

Grafted In And Called Higher

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The Bible says that we have been grafted in. We have been received into his family. And some of us are still living today in bondage. We are living lives of servants when he has called us to be princes. God has something more for this church. I was talking to somebody yesterday or the day before. I don't remember. I say it a lot. My dad said it. You remember when my dad came to preach? It was a while ago. He told me, he said, Be ready, son. Let me ask you, are you ready? God is establishing his dominion on this earth. And I want to be right in the middle of it. Well,

A Readiness Check For The Church

SPEAKER_00 1:05

if you don't know, today is our bass player, Dale. It's his birthday. Did he leave? I don't see him. Well, if you see him, tell him happy birthday. But some of some of you get some of you are getting it. The holy people understand that we're standing for the reading of God's word. So if the rest of y'all catch up, we'll get y'all to the altar one one day. So I want to preach today from a simple text. It's only a couple of verses, but if you have your Bibles, turn to Revelation chapter 2, verses 4 and 5. And it's it's very simple, but it penetrates the heart. I want you to understand this. Look at Revelation chapter 2, 4, and 5. And it says, But I have this complaint against you. Isn't that just the way you want to hear encouragement? Proverbs says that no discipline is pleasant at the time. I think a lot of times if we receive the discipline of Christ, the discipline of the Holy Spirit, we will begin to understand that at the time it will not be fun. We will not enjoy it, but long term we will outlast the enemy. If we apply these things, verse 4 says, But I have this plan against you. You don't love me or each other as you did at first. You know, he's not writing to the sinner here.

unknown 2:26

Well, come on now, come on.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

He is writing to the people of God, he is writing to the church, and he's saying, I'm have to write you, and this is my complaint. You ain't loving me like you used to love me. That sounds like a country song. You ain't loving each other like you used to love each other. Church, we have to be on guard and on purpose, loving each other in the church. If the devil can find any crack in the foundation of the house of God, he will find a way into our relationships. Look how far you have fallen. Turn back to me and do the works you did at first. If you don't repent, listen to this. Now, this sounds like a daddy. Like you're on the phone and you're somewhere you ain't supposed to be, and daddy said, Listen, if you don't get over here right now, I'm pretty sure I had this conversation about five times just Friday. Where are you? What are you doing? If you don't get over here right now, you won't be able to sit down for a week.

unknown 3:37

Come on now.

SPEAKER_00 3:39

So now that we got the East Texas translation down, he says, I will come and remove your lampstand. What is a lampstand? It is a light. He's going to remove the actual lampstand here, is saying it represents the church. The church is to be the light. He's saying, I'm going to come and take your church from you if you don't start loving each other. I will move the lampstand from its place among the churches. Let's pray. Father, thank you so much for your mercy and your grace. Thank you, Lord, for your presence here today. I pray that every person here, their mind be renewed, their hearts be transformed, the bondage be loose, and they turn from their wicked ways, and they turn to you, Christ Jesus. In your name we pray. Amen. I know when we hear, turn from your wicked ways, we think of people outside of the church. Any other church members in the house love to point at people outside the church of how wicked and bad they are. And we forget that God sees us too. So

Back To The First Series Setup

SPEAKER_00 4:52

we're going to be starting a series today. And it's called Back to the First. So this is a some of y'all, who's an 80s baby? Who grew up? And 80s was your high school years. We're gonna talk to y'all today. If you really want to feel old, do you remember last Sunday when the the missionaries were here and they talked? We went out to eat with them Saturday night. And Jesse, uh, sister Jesse was born in 1990, and they said, Oh my goodness, we're old. So sometimes when you're looking at other people's birthdays, you're like, Wow, I had kids when you were being born. Some of you, I had grandkids when you were being born. I don't know if we got some great grandkids, but hey. So if you were around in the 80s, you probably remember the movie Back to the Future. Matter of fact, you probably remember they used to do movies, they still do probably a little bit, but back then it was a thing. Everything that came out, it was a part of a trilogy. That was a thing. Everything, I mean, are we talking, are we talking church today? The Father, Son, the Holy Spirit. Come on, somebody. You go to a Mexican restaurant, you have tres leches, three different kinds of milks. Father, son, holy ghost. Amen. And so we're gonna be kind of basing this around the 1980s era. And it was back to the future, but we're gonna say back to the first. First what? First works, as we mentioned here in the text. As I was being a back to the future fan, uh, I was like, you know what? I saw this and I said, you know, this has nothing to do with the Bible, by the way. You know, sometimes we over-spiritualize everything, and we're like, oh, back to the future, Jesus went back in time and he, whatever you say, I don't know. This is not scriptural. This is to help you remember to go back and do your first works again. If

Prayer That Changes The Atmosphere

SPEAKER_00 7:15

you've noticed, and as I screamed, the very first words out of my mouth when we started today's service was this is the third Sunday in a row that we are going to do baptism. Every time on Tuesday, a prayer meeting, if you don't know, Tuesday, 10 a.m., 7 p.m., we have prayer meeting up here at the church. We got music playing. I walk around, and Sister Jesse does it in the evening times, and I anoint the corners of this church. I anoint, I even anoint my car as I pass it because Lord knows I got a used vehicle, and sometimes those things get expensive. So I anoint it and claim in Jesus' name that thing's gonna go until I run it into the ground. I go over and anoint that classroom, and I walk along this street and I say, Lord, everybody that passes this road, let them be drawn in by your spirit. I come back in, I anoint every single thing on this platform, including those drumsticks. So if they ever fly, it's because they are slicked up and lathered up by the anointing. And this thing sits back there, and you probably can see on that thing there's some grease spots on the top of it. That's because my hands have been laying on that thing. And I've been praying to God ever since we have started this church, taking this church over. I've been praying that God will begin to bring people in that need Jesus and want to say publicly that they are making the choice to change their life. And I say, God, I want us to wear this thing out. Out of the many prayers that I pray over this church, and one of them, don't pray against me. One of them is also for someone to come in and lead worship. Some of y'all praying against me. You better stop it. Because I need to be the pastor, we need to be the pastors. And it's not that we can't do it, it's not that the load is too heavy, it's just I need that person alongside me to do ministry. And I probably got multiple personalities up here, I don't know, but it's just it gets too much with me all in my head by myself. I need somebody on the outside helping me. So when I say God, I want to wear this thing out, and this is the third Sunday in a row. I say, God, I want people to be drawn by your spirit to come in. And we have people sitting here right now that said, I didn't know what was going on, but I felt like I just needed to sit into the parking lot. Why am I saying this? Because prayer works when you begin to pray in the spirit, when you begin to pray from the depths of your soul, I don't want God to have to bring me to the place of Job for me to understand what prayers are supposed to be. I actually, this morning, I was walking through the house and I said, God, please don't I love you. Please don't try to teach me a lesson by taking everything. I don't know how you pray to God, but I'm real with him. I say exactly what's on my mind. Even David would scream out to the Father in anguish and pain and hurt, and then lift himself right back up in the same chapter. You know, God's not scared of what you have to say to him.

unknown 10:27

Come on, man.

SPEAKER_00 10:29

He's not scared of your disappointments, he's not scared of your anger. His shoulders are wide and broad, and he can take it. But after you get it out, sometimes we gotta stomp God. See, sometimes God watches us stomp it out on the ground like a little kid angry and kicking in the middle of Walmart. If you've ever had a brat for a child, you know. And if you didn't know what that was, that's what that is. God wants us to be real with him. He doesn't want a churchy bride. He wants people who are real, honest, and vulnerable before an Almighty God. So

Be Kind, Rewind To First Works

SPEAKER_00 11:12

as to give a reference of what we're gonna talk about today, back to the future, but you can see the little text that says, Be kind, rewind. If you grew up back in the day, this is authentic. Oh, I almost got it. It says Christmas 1990. Stephen and Larry, which is my dad, singing. I don't have a way to watch this. I don't know how it was in my office. Thank you, Lord, for the prop. So, for those of you who don't understand, those of you who are younger, when you stick this in a thing, all this black stuff in here goes to the other side. And if you anybody remember Blockbuster before the internet took over and killed them, Blockbuster, that was what they used to call movies that came out and did so well. It was a blockbuster film. And you would go to Blockbuster. I remember the little emblem up the top. They had like a little, it looked like a movie ticket. It'll say Blockbuster. Man, you go in there, and as a little kid, you ask stupid questions like what are those movies at the top that are covered? You didn't know you were walking in the devil's den. Had no clue. I remember going through there, flipping them over. What you do if you don't know what you want to rent, you go through and you actually read the back of it. Some of y'all do that with books. You say you read a book and you read the back of it. We call that glyphotes. And so when you rent this movie from the counter, this is before it was like this, and now you have the movie in your house or on your phone, we would go in, we would rent something that looked exactly like this, in a little sleeve, just like this, with a cool 1980s or 1990s text. Probably looked a lot like that, and then it would have a picture of the hero, it'd probably even have a picture of the villain, and then you take it in, and if you didn't rewind before you brought it back in, they would penalize you with the small feet. So let me tell you, just like we can be penalized for not rewinding, we can get in our Christian walk as mature Christians, stale, bitter, arrogant, complacent, and all we have to do is rewind and go back a little bit. Matter of fact, you don't have to rewind, they'll still penalize you for a price. Trust me, you gotta go all the way back to the first part of the movie. Why? Because the next person in line to rent that movie, they don't want to start in the middle. Yeah, so apparently they had some complaints along the way that was enough so that they would begin to penalize you for bringing in something that was not rewound to the very beginning. Sometimes in our Christian walk, we become penalized because we are not going back and repeating our first works, and we're living in now, and we forget that where you come from is not anything that you did. Pulling you out of there by salvation and by Jesus is not anything that you have done. This is actually right here a piece of history. It really is. I tried putting it in my car, it didn't work. Some of y'all overthinking, I can't put it in there, okay? It was a joke. My car actually does have a CD player, those still exist for now. Although some of you are like, What's a C D? But the VHS made its debut in 1976. That's when they started putting out all the major stuff for it. They were pushing it hard. If you remember and you bought one, a VHS player in that era of time, when they first came out, they were expensive. Like my parents bought one, I think it was twelve hundred dollars. Woo! They can get one for like 20 bucks off of eBay, if that. And it stepped down to some of you who don't understand. This is just a number two pencil. To the others of you who have lived this life, you understand that a step down from this is called a cassette tape. It's the little cousin to a VHS. And the way you would rewind that is you still, I don't know, it had to be a conspiracy because it's the perfect fit and it didn't slip. You put it in there and you had your friend hold it, and you go, and you can have that thing rewound in 20 to 30 minutes. Then you put in the cassette player and you hit start and you hit play because you want to know if you found the spot of the song you've been trying to find for three hours. And if you did, well, you put your put it back in there, you twist it a little further until you get to the song that you're trying to get to. Well, how do you know? Well, on the side of there, they're numbered of where they are, and they have the little text that says where the songs are organized. Some of y'all just gave y'all anxiety talking about what you had to do number two pencil multiple uses. Some of you had what we would call a Walkman. A Walkman. You strap that thing to your side. I remember I had a banana yellow one. It would clip to my little pocket right there. I'll walk around, and it was like the junkiest, terrible, worst headphones in the world. And I would listen for so long, my earlobes would actually hurt. Because there was this little foam padding, and that was it. And in between, over your hair, was the little metal piece. Man, y'all that got headphones today or the little things that just go in your ear, don't get it. You have not suffered through. While you're worrying about and whining about what you're gonna do here and there and all this stuff on Instagram and Facebook, we worked out our anxiety and frustration on cassette players and tape decks. And we were we were the stuff. Some of y'all had guns and roses blasting. Some of y'all had Def Leopard, Queen's Easy, Top, Foreigner, the Police, AC, D C. Some of y'all start, y'all can't stop moving when the Iron Man movies are playing and they put on that AC DC. It's like their theme throughout. Some of y'all might have hit Rush. Thinking that we were the coolest, and there was nothing that was gonna come our way that our music wasn't gonna fix. So you you feel that feeling that I described, and you had got a little nostalgic as I was telling you, and explaining and reminding you of some places you've been that you thoroughly enjoyed.

When Knowledge Turns Into Pride

SPEAKER_00 18:38

That's what repeating your first fruits is all about. Because something that I know in any relationship, and we can apply this to our relationship with God, is that the longer we're in a relationship, the harder you have to try to stay in it and be happy. I've heard of people getting divorced because they just ended up not liking each other, it's just not working out. What happened was somewhere along the line, you stopped lusting and started learning who they were. And so we get caught up in this biblically spiritually, we get excited about God, we get crazy for Jesus, we're on fire, we got our spiritual walkman on our hip, and nothing can touch us, but then we get older and we get more mature and we get what we think wiser, and we begin to get what is bluntly being arrogant and self-righteous. And we act as if where we come from and where God brought us out of is something that we have done. And let me tell you something. It doesn't matter if you used to do drugs like me, or you was in jail, or you spent most of your life in prison, or if you were like my perfect wife, and you you're sneaking, uh, being the devil worshiper was sneaking in the bathroom to put on makeup. She came from old school Pentecost. Anybody know what I'm talking about? You didn't wear makeup, you didn't do nothing. You wore skirts all the time. Thank the Lord, times have changed. I got a closet full of ties, and I don't wear one of them. Woo! Choke me. And so it doesn't matter if you've lived a life full of nothing but sin, or you lived a life of what we say sometimes we call good, and you were the perfect little angel. Some of you can attest that your wives, you don't know why they're with you, but for some reason they are, and you praise God that they were the angel and they ended up marrying the devil. But every person, whether you think you're good or whether you think you've done something in your life that is worth a status or a stature or bragging about, you are nothing. You are filthy rags against God. We are nothing but filthy rags next to God's righteousness. No matter how you have lived your life, what you have gone and done, what life you may be trapped in now, what kind of atmosphere you have in your house, at the mention of the name of Jesus, everything can change. And you know, a lot of times something that I've learned is that it wasn't that everything changed around me, it was that something began to change in me. But it was, it starts. Let me say this. When we get so self-righteous that we don't think that we need to come for prayer, but we only need to do the praying. That holy hush just hit. When we don't feel like we have anything to work on, the enemy's work has already begun. But what we have to do is be vigilant. On purpose, Christianity. I don't know if you've noticed this, but if you've been going here for any amount of time, I have been screaming every Sunday about spiritual maturity. Why? Because we have. Babies in the church that just throw fence, get angry with each other, they they start making clinics, they begin to bring division to the house of God, and I will not stand for that in the church. Well, how do we fight against that? By individuals becoming spiritually mature to where if we have aught against each other, we can go to each other and talk. That is the way God has designed us because he values relationship. Some of us will not stop looking at people a certain way because we know what they've done. When I guarantee you, every person in here has something that has sinned against God that we would we would blush if we put it on the screen. That if you don't think you have, then you're a liar because God is not. And he said, All have sinned. That's too blunt. You mean bring it back and land it a little softer? Your righteousness compared to God's righteousness is nothing but filthy rags. And so when we become so mature, it's funny because it we we reach this point where we we first come to God and we're on fire. We want to tell everybody what God has done. We want to tell them the truth, and we have so much love and compassion in our hearts because we just got love and compassion from the Loving Father. And we got salvation we didn't deserve, we got grace and mercy that we didn't earn, and we can't. We know we're going to heaven. We have this in our hearts, and it's bubbling out of us. Well, then once we become more knowledgeable of the word and we find out that, well, there's there's uh uh theology to be learned sometimes. Theology can mess up your witness. It might give you more knowledge, but it makes you dumber. Because it makes you begin to feel like you've you're earning something. So, what does that do? That gets us to a point to where we take God out of the driver's seat, we place ourselves in the driver's seat, and now we begin to earn our way, and nobody else can do what we're doing. Nobody else can measure up to the standard that we set. And oftentimes, when we get in this place, we don't want any discipline from nobody in church because I've got it figured out. Can I be spiritually vulnerable with you today? I have been in this place where I thought because I studied so much that I learned so much that I that I had wisdom. God reminded me very quickly that what he gives to me, the wisdom he gives me, the knowledge he allows me to have that he blesses me with, is not anything that I have done, but it is only from the Father. This is why that feeling that you got when I began to describe the Walkman on your hip, because probably almost everybody in here did it. Or if you manipulated the system in your car when things begin to progress a little bit and you still had a tape deck in your car, but things went to CDs. Well, then you got your CD player that was anti-skip, which was pretty cool. And then you can push the little button, it drains the batteries, but man, it didn't skip anymore. And you could, and I did do it, I put it on my belt too. I put it right here, and I was like, hey, it don't even skip. And then you get this little thing where the headphones go in, but it runs actually to a fake tape that goes into your tape deck in your car. My 1992 Thunderbird was blasting with every CD I got when I found out, oh, there's a converter I can get to put in here. Did you feel that? It sparked some sort of emotion inside of you that made you go back to a place where you did it too.

Remembering Grace Fuels Obedience

SPEAKER_00 26:00

When we as Christians stop acting like we are the Savior, and we realize that that we may not have it all figured out, we need to stop right where we are and go back to the place where God found us and picked us up out of the dirt and made something, where he took our mess and made it a message, where he took the test and made it a testimony, where he took everything in our lives that we did not deserve, and he said, If you put it in my hands, I will bless it and give it back to you. I destroyed my first time around with family, and God has blessed me beyond anything I ever deserved. Because I was telling the men at the men's breakfast yesterday, I can't explain why God has blessed me in the way that He has. I I have no reason, I have no good reason. I can I can list you a Santa Claus list where they unroll it and the scroll goes down on the floor and it keeps going. A list of stuff why he shouldn't. But that whole list of stuff when applied, when the blood is applied, that whole list of stuff when his mercy and grace are applied, it vanishes, and it says, You are mine, and that's it. You are mine, that doesn't make you perfect. Baptism does not make you perfect, salvation does not make you perfect, but it births, it begins to birth something inside of you that makes you want to strive to be better and to be holy. And then when you mess up, that grace and that mercy apply again. And he says, Get back up, child. Your job is not done, you are not done, you are not dead, you are not done. And this flashback of Blockbuster. I remember I would spend, oh my goodness. Matter of fact, never mind. I spend the same time now trying to find something to watch. But you go through the aisles and they got the action, they got the comedy, and they got the uh drama or whatever the woman's section is, and and uh and you skip past that because you're 13 and you're a man and nobody's supposed to see you in that section because apparently that takes away your manhood or something, I don't know. And then you spend hours reading, looking. Oh, I I know this face, I know this face. I do the same now with the stupid stuff on my TV, and then I get so frustrated because we're trying to find a movie that's like this is dumb. What let's just go watch what we usually watch. But that nostalgia, where it your mind goes back to the place where you remember something good. Sometimes in your life, maybe you're sitting here right now and you're in the middle of your life and you can't remember anything good. You look around you, and the valley is so dark, and there's things life can get hard and it can get lonely. But as David began to pull himself up by the bootstraps and begin to remind himself of the goodness of God, let me remind you today: the goodness of God is still good, he is still real, he is still active, and he still is alive, and he still cares about you right where you are. That you don't have to boast about yourself to get people to like you, God will raise you up. God will lift you when you begin to lift him. It makes no common sense for me to give all the glory and all the honor to God, and then he ends up giving me his glory and his honor. But that's how he operates. All he's asking is for submission and obedience, and this is why we are told to repeat our first fruits because we can get stale and stagnant and complacent in our Christian walk. I

The 5-5-5 Daily Faith Challenge

SPEAKER_00 30:02

want you to ask yourself this, and I say it every week. It is my challenge to you, it is my challenge to myself. The challenge of 17, five minutes of prayer, five minutes of reading your word, five minutes and praising God before you start your day. Not that it's gonna make your day be any different than it was already going to be, but it will make you ready for whatever comes your way. And then do one small act of faith every single day. Some of you, it's just getting up and going to the job that you hate. And then invite one person to church. Some of y'all doing your job. Let me explain this to you. Uh where we come from. My pastor said this, and at first I was like, well, that's dumb, but it makes a lot of sense now that I'm now that I'm older. You are the sheep. The sheep birth sheep. Are you doing your part? I hope you come tonight to the service because we're going to be uh going to be preaching about hearing and doing. That we oftentimes will listen. But we never do. We don't apply. Now listen to this. We'll read it one more time. But I have this complaint against you. You don't love me or each other as you first or you did at first. Look at how you fallen. Turn back to me and do. Turn to your neighbor and say, do. Y'all a bunch of weak little turn to your neighbor and say, do. Now turn to him again and say, do it. Do it, do the works you did at first. It's not just enough to say that you're sorry, you have to repent to turn from your wicked ways. This is not a genuine repentance. Real repentance, as described, is our key text, and it describes this an inward change and a turning point that results in outward transformation. When you go and repeat your first fruits, some of us allow bad habits and personality traits to manufacture themselves over time, even though we still love Jesus. Yeah, I don't like self-examination. That's okay, we'll get there. It is possible for good Christian, God-loving, God-fearing people to allow bad habits to manifest themselves in us over time. But we need to check ourselves and ask ourselves: what does God want me to get rid of? Real repentance is an inward change and a turning that results in an outward transformation. Real inward repentance shows evidence that true repentance has occurred, that we that they needed to repent and do the first works. The word do refers to an outward action, the outward proof of repentance. The word do in this text right here is actually Greek for pollo. Not pollo, not chicken. We ain't talking Spanish. I know that's where y'all went. Oh, a chicken. This word, pollo, is used, not pollo, pollo, pollo. That was probably an 80s song, is used 568 times in the New Testament. It literally means to do. The word pollo, it's so hard now that I think of chicken, I can't get it out of my head. It describes all kinds of activity, particularly the creative aspect of activity. And actually, poetis is a form of the word pollo, and it actually is where we get the word poet. So this word describes a doing that produces actual results, a creative person that actually is supposed to be doing something and creating something and manufacturing something that will have real results. So when we become stale and stagnant in our spiritual rut, we repeat, we need to repeat repentance, restore and reconcile, be transformed and renewed, and the do walk through that again. The do part, the do part of salvation to walk through that again. Because remember where God brought you from. Remember, remember, remember, we get so caught up in what's in front of us sometimes. It's funny, we can do one or the other. We can get real caught up in the now, or we never leave the past. Live in the now, but remember what God has done. Because the things that are in front of you right now, when you remember what God has done in your life, it begins to fuel your faith to know that He can do it again. When you don't just be short-sighted, but be where you can see by faith that God will. Some of y'all are not living in the healing God has available for you. Emotionally, physically, spiritually, mentally, God has healing in the house. How do I know this? Because the Bible tells me that my God stays the same, He is constant. It doesn't matter what changes around you, He is constant. That's why the joy of the Lord, not happiness, but the joy of the Lord is your strength. That you can find actual joy and be joyful, full of joy in spite of what everything looks like around you. In spite of what the doctor says, in spite of how your marriage is, in spite of how your children or grandchildren are acting, in spite of God still is on the throne. But it requires something of us. We must have a due mentality. I know, and you know, as people who have probably read any common scripture that we know that we're supposed to pray. We know we're supposed to read. But we oftentimes leave out as Christians the do. We oftentimes will sit back and let somebody else be the do while we sit there and talk about the who. We'll criticize. All right, let's just go on. Let's go on. Sometimes

Repentance That Produces Real Change

SPEAKER_00 36:59

in our life as seasoned Christians, we have things still attached to us that we're not willing to let that we should have let go of when we gave our heart to Christ. And this could be years later. We have stuff that we aren't willing to let go and let God handle it. And what this does is it becomes dead weight to our spirit. We wonder, and then we get all these questions in our head like, Well, why is God not doing what I'm asking him to do? Why am I praying but I'm not seeing like I would like to see? Why am I praying but things aren't happening? Why am I praying and people aren't being healed? Why am I praying and everything around me seems to stay exactly the same way before I begin to pray and believe? Now listen, I'm not coming to you like Job's friends and say, Well, are you a sinner? And what have you done wrong to God? You know, I'm not doing that. But I'm saying we need to be willing to look. Can we all agree on that? There needs to be a due part to where we are. We have to understand that where we are is not where we're ending. Every person in here still has a purpose and still has a mission that God has for you. It doesn't matter what you've done, it doesn't matter where you come from, it doesn't matter how bad you think you have been, just like it doesn't matter how good you think you've been. When the blood becomes a plot, addictions have to leave. God makes anxiety nervous, He makes depression run. It doesn't matter what has tried to grip your heart and your soul and try to take ownership of you and weigh you down. My Bible says that who the Son sets free is free indeed. What does that tell me? That tells me that the people of God still in bondage need to be delivered. Read some of Paul's letters in the New Testament. It was to a church that was sexually immoral, it was full of debauchery, and anything you could think or name of was in the church. Because they started becoming self-righteous and thinking that they were the ones that were the key to the success of what the church was doing, and they stopped checking themselves, they stopped looking and examining their hearts. Nobody ends up in the depths of sin. You ask anybody who has ever cheated on a spouse, it didn't just all of a sudden happen and you just whoo here. And this applies to everything in your life. Look at yourself. Matter of fact, step out of the equation and say, Spirit of God, examine me. What do I need to let loose of? What do I need to let go of? What who do I need to walk away from? God purify me. Here recently, God has been tearing me up because I see and I hear of stories of pastors falling left and right and damaging the body, damaging the witness of Christ. Because at some point they thought that they were the man, they thought that they were the one. Because the people around them enjoyed them, they loved them and would put them on a pedestal and they begin to believe what people told them about themselves. May we never forget in the church house to go back and remember where God has brought us from. Remember where He pulled us out of. That

Put God First Again

SPEAKER_00 41:30

it is not us who saved us, but it was the Heavenly Father who loved us and cared, and Jesus gave his life for us. To live the life that we couldn't live, to die the death that we couldn't die. May we always be willing when we find ourselves like here in Revelation that we're off the path a little bit, that we veered off little by little, and we look and we're like, I don't recognize who I am or where I am. Sin has a funny way of doing that to you. It'll take you places that you never wanted to go and take you further than you ever wanted to be. Thank God for mercy and grace. Who, in spite of me, still loves me, who, in spite of you, still loves you, in spite of what you've done or where you have been, he still, with the blood applied, can save any sinner. And I know that if he can save a wretch like me, who am I to say to anybody that he can't save a wretch like you? But we have to be willing. This applies to everybody. Be willing to look and say, Maybe I have slacked in my relationship with God. Maybe I have made my family, Jesus said, even, leave your family, your mother, your sister, your brother, your children. That was not a thumbs up for you to walk away from your family. But it's an example of how much God should be first in your life, not just another thing on the list for you to check off. He needs to be first. And sometimes we get so distracted, and life gets so busy, we have to go back to our first to make him first again.