All right, who's ready for some good news? Because I have some.

A couple of powerful things happened to our church last week and I want to announce those before I teach in Ezekiel chapter 18 today. Did you know that great commission church is having a baby? We really are. We are having a baby church. We are planting a new congregation targeting the Bahalia Mississippi kind of corridor area over there.

Michael Caffe and Melanie and their team that they call refuge church. Bahelia has been meeting together, praying, evangelizing, working on starting this new work in a town that could really benefit from a new alive church. And the difficulty has been finding a place to meet the rent on event centers there is sky high, they're not always available. We were actually talking to a person who is a business owner in town and they have an old three story or three story building and their business is on the second floor and they have this basement and they said, you know, our basement could be built out and it was actually kind of perfect for a smaller church. So we had resigned ourselves that we're going to be the church that meets in the basement.

And here's what happened about three weeks ago. There's a church on Bahelia Road as a facility and the congregation has been dying. They had gotten down to ten or twelve people. Their pastor was about to retire the building. They don't owe anything on the property.

It's got about 7500 church building, about five and a half acres of property on a fantastic highway that goes through Bahelia and the community of Bartone. And they heard that we had a church that we were going to start and so they just contacted us and said, hey, we're dying, you're alive. We don't want this facility to go to anything other than a church of like faith and practice. Would you be interested? And so we said, well, let's pray about that.

And we said the shortest prayer in history. Thank you Jesus. And here's what happened. All the legal stuff's been worked out, all the, all the details have been worked on. Don McKenzie and the team of church administration has been taking care of that.

And this last week, what was left of their church, unanimously and enthusiastically voted to give us their property.

Everything's paid for, 7500 square foot church building, million dollar piece of property and all their cash assets. And said, please plant the life giving church here. So I just wanted you to know that that happened last week and I think we ought to cheer and thank God we didn't manipulate it, we didn't make it happen. He just kind of dropped it in our laps. And so that was amazing.

I want to tell you, though, that wasn't the most powerful thing that happened in our church last week. I want to tell you what the most powerful thing that happened last week. Washington, not too long ago, one of the teenage girls in our church invited one of her friends to our ministry here, and she heard the gospel and she believed and became a Christian. How great is that? And then recently she invited her mom, who last week heard the gospel and prayed to receive Christ, and she became a Christian last week.

That is the most powerful thing that happened in our ministry. And so. And here's why, you know, we can pay somebody who does it for a living to go to this almost six acres of land with a church building on it on Bahia Road, and they can appraise that property for us and they can tell us in a fair market way how much it's worth. But when you try to begin to put a number on a lost soul living in darkness, seeing the light of Jesus, believing in the Lord and receiving eternal life, you can't measure that. It can't be appraised.

It's priceless. And it's all of God. It's what he's doing. And so I just thought we'd start out with some good news. So how did I do?

Is that okay? All right, good. My name is Trevor Davis. I'm GCC's pastor. And this month in August, I'm preaching in and around Ezekiel, chapter 18, an Old Testament prophet.

Not a familiar text to most people, I'm assuming, but one that's just been on my mind for over two years and have been looking for a place to kind of sneak this in. And so at the end of the month, I will not have preached every verse in Ezekiel 18, but we will have made lots of progress. And so here's the name of my series, the soul who sins shall die. Amen. How about that?

Fun for the whole family. And I'm not trying to be overly dramatic. It's just that's one of the verses that's repeated twice in Ezekiel 18, and all truth is God's truth, and he wants us to learn something in this text. And so to do so, I'm actually not going to get to Ezekiel 18 until the end of the message, but we are going to do a quick survey in the Old Testament, because in the Old Testament, among the kings of Judah, there was a dynasty that included three interesting stories in a row, or a better way to say that is three generations on the throne in Jerusalem consecutively, a grandfather, a father and a son. Their names in order are Hezekiah, Manasseh and Josiah.

Grandfather, father, son. And what I'm going to do is, as I summarize what they were like when they were kings over Judah, the contrast between them show us two important truths. As I end this little survey about these three guys, I'll give you those two truths, and then we will look at four or five verses in Ezekiel 18, make some application and be done. So that's my talk today. So if you're ready, say yes.

Here's the legacy the grandfather left. Here's what we know about King Hezekiah. Two kings, 18 three says, and he did what was right in the sight of the Lord. Now, the title of my message is, if a man is just. And we start out with one of the just kings in scripture.

That's verse three of two kings, 18. Here's what verses five and six say about Hezekiah. He trusted in the Lord. He held fast to the lord and he obeyed the lord's commandments. All of those things are getting, are building up a very positive profile for this guy named Hezekiah.

So we're off to a good start. He did what was right in the sight of the Lord. But as you know, a good story is going to have some drama. And when a formidable enemy threatened the Lord's people, when Hezekiah was on the throne, the first thing he did, Hezekiah prayed. He didn't panic.

He didn't try to act out of his own humanity and figure things out. He went before the Lord. And when he prayed, God sent him a prophet with a word from heaven. You know that prophet by the name of Isaiah. And here's what God said through Isaiah.

The prophet, two kings, 1920. Thus says the Lord, God of Israel, because you have prayed to me against Sennacherib, king of Assyria, I have heard. So one thing I want you to note is that God hears the prayers of just men and women. In the Old Testament, if God answers somebody's prayer, it says that God heard it. And if he doesn't answer, it means that he ignored the prayer and refused to listen to it.

So God hears Hezekiah's prayer. And so what's going to happen when God hears it? What's the result? Well, the result is, as this invading army is threatening the inhabitants of Jerusalem, God brings a dominating victory against the invaders. What if I told you that the angel of the lord killed 185,000 assyrian troops overnight?

Would you say that that would be a dramatic answer to prayer. Well, sometime later, after that great victory, after this, just man had his prayers answered, the things turned. His life got a little different. Sometime later, Isaiah warned the king. He said, hey, I need you to go cross all your t's and dot all your I's.

Hezekiah, you need to get your affairs in order because you will die soon. Now coming off that great victory of 185,000 enemy soldiers being killed by God in one night, this is a 180 degree turn. You don't expect God to come and say, hey, remember how awesome your life was. I'm going to put a stop to that. You will die soon.

You need to get all your papers ready. You need to get everything in order. And the question is, well, how did Hezekiah respond to those words? Well, he wept and he prayed. And so far Hezekiah's prayer track record is good.

Let's see if it remains the same. Two kings, chapter 20, verse three. Here's Hezekiah's second prayer. Remember now, o Lord, I pray how I've walked before you in truth and with a loyal heart and have done what was good in your sight. And Hezekiah weptehen bitterly.

So here's a king that God had won a great battle for. Now God brings bad news. Your life's about to end. I'm done with your monarchy. And Hezekiah says, well, I prayed last time.

It worked. Let me go before the Lord again. And it's interesting to me that Hezekiah goes before the Lord and he says, do you remember God, my testimony? Do you remember how I walked before you in truth? Do you remember my faithfulness to you?

This news is more than I can bear. I don't want to die yet. And then he just weeps before the Lord. And wouldn't you know it, God was moved in his spirit by the fervent prayer of the king. Even though it was kind of a selfish personal prayer.

Here's what God said in light of Hezekiah's prayer. God, I really don't want to die. Second kings 25 six. I have heard your prayer. I've seen your tears.

Surely I will heal you. On the third day you shall go up to the house of the Lord and I will add to your days. 15 years. Hezekiah had one killer prayer life. I'm going to just go ahead and submit that to you.

He prays to the Lord and the Lord kills 185,000 of his enemies. God says, oh, it's time for you to die. And Hezekiah says, wait, I don't want to die. I've been faithful to you. I want to continue to walk with you.

And the Lord says, okay, your prayers move me again. Here's 15 more years. How many of you know that if Hezekiah was on our prayer team, his line would be the longest every week? Pretty remarkable. God hears the prayers of the just.

In some sense, Hezekiah changed the Lord's mind by his prayer. He was a just man. Okay, so, so far, so good. What kind of sons do just men produce in the Bible? What kind of king would his son be now?

His son's name is Manasseh. Everybody say Manasseh. Okay, Manasseh. Let's learn about him. Two kings, 21 two.

And he did evil in the sight of the Lord. Well, we're off to a bad start. According to the abominations of the nations whom the Lord had cast out before the children of Israel, now we call the nations that the Lord cast out before the children of Israel. In the book of Joshua, the Canaanites, these were godless, unbelieving pagan people, just heathens. And Manasseh says, you know what?

I like their worldview better than the worldview of my father. And so I'm going to lead these Israelites to do it like them. And I'm not going to read all the verses that tell us what Manasseh did, but I will summarize them. I'll list them for you right here. Number one, he rebuilt the high places, and I restored the altars of Baal.

The king in Israel is supposed to be faithful to the covenant. He's supposed to be the example to the whole nation. And the first thing that Manasseh does is says, I'm changing who we worship, where we worship, and how we worship. He rebuilds the high places. Then it says he worshiped and served the host of heaven.

So this guy gets into astrology and horoscopes and I and other white magic forms of forbidden worship. And then it says he caused his sons to pass through the fire. Now that's a flowery way to say child sacrifice. It means he was taking the firstborn sons and throwing them onto the burning stone hands of a carved idol named Moleche and listen to the sizzle of infant boys dying in the fire offered to a false God. Now, America did that for 50 something years under Roe versus Wade.

We let our children pass through the fire. And so we were just as canaanite as this guy was. And then the verse says that he practiced the occult. So he brought in Satan worship and all of this forbidden arts. And here is how he summarizes the reign of Manasseh.

In two kings, Manasseh shed so much innocent blood that it filled Jerusalem with it. This was the most godless king ever in the history of Israel, apparently. And here's what God says about him in two kings, 20, 111. Twelve. Because Manasseh, king of Judah, has done these abominations.

What kind of abominations? He's acted more wickedly than all the Amorites who were before him. And he's also made Judah sin with his idols. Do you remember when Jesus said it'd be better for you to have a millstone tied around your neck and you'd be drowned in the sea rather than cause one of these little ones to stumble? That's the same verse here in the Old Testament.

He's made Judah sin with his idols. Here's what God says in response to that. Behold, I'm bringing such calamity upon Jerusalem and Judah that whoever hears of it, both his ears will tingle. They will talk about the judgment I'm about to bring.

So that's what kind of son Hezekiah had, Manasseh. Turns out Manasseh wasn't a chip off the old block, was he? In fact, Manasseh is the apple that fell so far away from the tree, you can't see the tree anymore. And then you find out he wasn't even an apple in the first place. Hezekiah's son didn't even believe in the God of his father.

Instead, Manasseh set himself up and the nation as an enemy of the lord. It was awesome, all wrong.

And so we would expect that since Manasseh's sons didn't grow up hearing the scriptures, since Manasseh's sons grew up watching their father hate the God of Moses and embrace the gods of the Canaanites, we would expect Manasseh's sons to exceed him in their own wickedness. What kind of king would Manasseh's son be? Well, his name is Josiah, and we read in two kings 22 two. And he did what was right in the sight of the Lord. Isn't that a relief?

Don't you want to know how that happened? Well, first of all, he wasn't the first of Manasseh's sons to take the throne. The first one was a big dud, and the lord moved him out pretty quickly and put Josiah in his place. When Josiah was eight years old, he's a second grade king now, I don't want you to think that God's foolish or that he doesn't think things through or that Josiah was some kind of superhero. He's eight years old, and some of the older, wiser men in Israel became his stewards, and they helped him in ways that he wouldn't know how to govern because he was so young and inexperienced.

But 18 years into his reign, the Bible says at the ripe old age of 26, Josiah has been a veteran king for 18 years. By the age of 26, something dramatic happened to him. One day, one of the priests who served under him was cleaning out a closet or some such room in the temple. And somewhere behind a door, hidden away, he found a book. When he looked at that book and realized what it was, he brought the book to the king.

And they read it in the presence of the king. You know what book it was? It was the book of the law of Moses. The scriptures. These are truths that Josiah, as a child, never had the opportunity to hear, never saw anybody live out in front of him.

When he heard the word of the Lord read from the scrolls of the Old Testament law, he was so overcome with emotion that he tears his clothes. He weeps. He hears the word of God. And he immediately caused the entire nation to mourn and repent of their longstanding collective sins, the ones that Manasseh led them to commit. Here's what King Josiah said.

The wrath of the Lord is aroused against us because our fathers have not obeyed the words of this book.

And when Manasseh did that, how did God respond? Two kings 20 219. He said, Josiah, because your heart was tender, and you humbled yourself before the Lord, and you tore your clothes and wept before me. Don't miss this. I also have heard you.

Do you know why? The word also is there. He's saying, Josiah, your prayers remind me of another who prayed to me, your grandfather. Another who did what was right in my sight. I have also heard you.

What if I told you there are 25 verses from two kings 23 four to two kings 23 24. Almost 25 verses committed to Josiah's sweeping, aggressive, sometimes violent reforms to move Judah, his people, back to faithfulness to God. I mean, he and some of his strong men went all over the region, and they got their demolition hands on, and they tore down all the altars of Baal, and they set them on fire. And then they went and grabbed by the necks some of the wicked men who were somehow still in office. And they put them to death before the Lord.

And they said, no, this place will be a place of holiness. This place will be committed to Yahweh, our God. No more worldly wickedness like my father brought. And you can read about it. One of the most incredible revivals ever in the Old Testament, brought by a king who started when he was eight years old.

And we read this summary statement in two kings 23 25. Now, before him, Josiah, there was no king like him who turned to the Lord with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses, nor after him did any arise like him. So now, by way of remembering, you have Hezekiah, a righteous, just king, and then he has a son who decides to go his own way. And he's the worst kind of king imaginable. But by the grace and electing love of God, he doesn't produce another wicked son.

God raises up a Josiah just. Unjust, just. And the reason I gave you that summary before we get quickly into Ezekiel chapter 18 is that those are three living human examples of the three test cases that we've come to in Ezekiel 18, just without names. I wanted to put some names on them for you so that you could understand what God's standards are. And here are those two truths I promised you at the beginning.

I do it in the form of a caution. Caution number one, a faithful father is no guarantee of a faithful son. See Hezekiah and Manasseh. Caution number two, neither does a wicked father condemn his son to the same wickedness. See Manasseh and Josiah.

It's important for you to grasp that if you want to know and understand Ezekiel chapter 18. Also if you want to make sure that your heart stays tender and right before God yourself. So I'm going to end the message today with the first case study that comes up in Ezekiel 18. It's where we left off last week. We did the first four verses last week I'm going to do verses five through nine.

Now let me read verses five through eight. It's a profile. It's a case study. It's a written summary of someone like Hezekiah or Josiah. What's a just man in Israel like?

Here we go. But if a man is just and does what is lawful and right, if he's not eaten on the mountains, nor lifted up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, nor defiled his neighbor's wife, nor approached a woman during her impurity, if he's not oppressed anyone, but has restored to the debtor his pledge, he has robbed no one by violence, but has given his bread to the hungry and covered the naked with clothing. If he has not exacted usury nor taken any increase, but has withdrawn his hand from iniquity and executed true judgment between Mandev. Man. Now, those just may look like a bunch of phrases of a religious man to you, but I'm going to show you that really what they are are three areas of a man's life that show his righteousness.

I'm going to pull some of those out and kind of meddle in your business a little bit. May I have permission to do so? Couldn't hear you. All right, because land in the plane now. Going to step on your toes a little because that's what the scriptures do.

And then I'm going to give you a relief vow by saying, you know what? One of the normal means of grace is having christian people who are just as broken as you and just as redeemed as you pray for you about these things.

Here are the three areas of a man's life. Show his righteousness. Number one, it's his worship. It's his worship according to verse six, the first two parts, a and b, it's worshiping Yahweh alone as the one true God. You see this man?

He does no eating on the mountains. You know what that means? That means he doesn't ascend into the foothills in Israel where Manasseh has built up all these shrines to the false canaanite gods. And he doesn't go up there and have a canaanite lord's supper worshiping the false gods of the Canaanites. In fact, he cares about how he worships God.

He's consecrated in what he does when he comes into the house of the Lord with the people of God. Since it matters to God, it matters to him. He is a just worshiper. No eating on the mountains. No looking to idols.

Now, what I'm going to tell you about this paragraph that we just read in Ezekiel is tucked away in this profile are four of the ten commandments. Here's the first one, commandment number two, you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a graven image. No looking to idols. If he hasn't eaten on the mountains, nor lifted up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel.

Now I want to ask you a question about just worship. Is the Lord God worthy to be worshipped? Yes or no? Are you sure? Is it right to worship God?

What if you're not a christian and not religious at all? Are you a non worshiper? The answer is no, because God built it in human DNA to worship things. Doesn't matter if it's religious. You will commit your life to something.

You'll commit your resources to it. You'll give it your best thoughts. You talk about what you think about and you think about what you love. You might worship a football team or a child or a job or some kind of material thing. We all worship and we're all filled with faith.

It's just misplaced faith. You're a worshiper. Is God, Yahweh worthy to be worshiped? And if he is, here's my follow up question to you. Should we ask God how he says he wants to be worshipped?

Because if he says, clap your hands and close your eyes and sing unto the Lord, or bow on your knees in prayer, or if he says, one of the ways to worship me is you don't offer me anything that costs you nothing. You don't come before me empty handed. If he says, look, you give attention to my words. And we're not just hearers of the word. We're not just hearers of the word.

We're also doers of it. If he's told us all these ways to worship, do we have the liberty to say, no, God, I got this. I'm going to choose my own adventure. I'm going to do my own preferences. I'm not going to sing to you.

I'm not going to listen while the word's being preached. My wife dragged me here. Isn't that good enough? I'm not going to engage and I'm not going to be radical, so don't even ask me.

Is that the attitude of a just man? You see, a just man worships Yahweh alone as the one true God. Pagan practices and false gods are rejected. Okay, that was the easy one of the three. The other two are harder.

Nothing's more difficult than this next one. The second area of a man that shows his righteousness is his morality.

When you come to church, it's not about, hey, can you just be a little bit better of a person? But God does have something to say about our private lives. Am I right about that? So his morality, here's what it says. He hasn't defiled his neighbor's wife and he hasn't approached his woman during her impurity.

I'm going to talk about this pretty frankly here, okay? But I can keep it PGD. Guarding and maintaining marital fidelity and moral purity is what this third and fourth parts of verse six teach. No defiling another man's wife. That's commandment number seven.

And commandment number ten. Commandment number seven, you shall not commit adultery. Commandment number ten, you shall not covet your neighbors wife. It's almost like the Bible teaches that marriage is for one man and one woman for a lifetime. It's almost like God expects you to pick a spouse and keep her and not look at someone else's.

Is that too much? Am I going overboard? Okay, well, it's the next one that kind of meddles. No defiling another man's wife, no intimacy while bleeding. I'm not going to go full on birds and bees and tell you exactly what that refers to, but you're probably old enough to figure it out.

And if you're not, and you're a teenager, you'll go google it later. But here's what I want to say. I want to say that from the beginning of time, God has made blood sacred. And the Canaanites and the other false worshipers consumed blood. They did blood rituals and got them on themselves.

And it just kind of followed through all the time. The Vikings did it. All these groups that didn't know God, they take, you know, God says the life of the body is in the blood. And Hebrews 922 says, in fact, everything must be cleansed with blood. And without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sin.

So that the New Testament can say in Paul's letters, in him, we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our sins. I wanna ask you, is the blood of Jesus a precious thing? Yes. This has been God's plan all along. And you know what he said?

He said, and my people live such holy, set apart lives that we don't treat blood the way unbelieving people treat it. So you don't go chasing after your wife while she's bleeding. This has been Old Testament law. And you're like, well, give me some New Testament. Okay.

In the early church, when we get to acts chapter 15, the big controversy was all these new christians aren't Jews. Now Paul's taking the gospel to the gentile world, but the messiah is jewish, and the gospel started in the old testament. And so exactly how much of Moses law do we have to keep? So all the church leaders in acts chapter 15 got together the apostles and some of the pastors and just the leading men, and they had this conference. And at the end of the conference, James speaks for everybody, the Lord's brother.

And he writes a letter and he says, here's the outcome of our conference. How much of the Old Testament, do christians have to be aware of, and are we responsible to pay attention to and obey? And the answer was, we'll give you a list of four things. Here's the list. Number one, you don't consume anything offered to idols.

So you just kind of stay out of the dens of iniquity. You stay away from those who worship falsely. You don't mix the world and the word. Number two, no blood. You don't consume animals that haven't had their blood drained.

You don't approach women when they're bleeding. You just. You treat blood differently than the world. Now, at the end of the first service after I preached this, a guy came to me, and when I saw him, I was like, mm. I knew exactly what he was going to ask me because I knew his background.

And I forgot to clarify this because he grew up in a Jehovah's Witness home. And here's what he came to me and said. He said, pastor, what about blood transfusions? And I said, I'm sorry, dear brother, I should have clarified that when I was preaching about this. The Lord, when he says, no blood, he means you don't consume it.

You don't get it on you. You don't play games with it. But blood transfusions and other medical breakthroughs are the gift of God. They're not condemned by God. So he breathed a big sigh of relief.

You know what he said? He said, my dad carries around a card with him everywhere he goes. And if a medical emergency happens, that card says, for the medical personnel, do not give me anybody's blood. And he said that almost with tears in his eyes. And I said, how many of the people that you grew up with died because of that stupid rule?

He says, I can't count them all, but we treat blood as believers sacredly because of what Jesus blood does for us. Now, I want to talk about sexual sin a little bit here. Just a little bit more. Did you know that in Ephesians five three, the Bible says, let it not even be named among you? Do you know that sex outside marriage and adultery and all kinds of fornication and pornography and all of the nonsense and all of the wickedness that we live around?

Do you know that God has never changed his mind about that? Do you know that God says that marriage is holy and important to him? And did you know that God instituted marriage before he instituted the church? And isn't it true that God gets to define what marriage is and he gets to say how valuable it is? Well, look, it's almost like he hasn't changed his mind.

And it's always been one man and one woman. So it can't be two men and two women, right? One man and one woman, not one man and as many women as he can have, and he throws other ones away and divorces them all the time, or the same, you can just reverse those genders. If anybody should lead the way in marital fidelity and sexual purity, shouldn't it be christians?

And yet you live in a culture that's saying not only should abominable perversions be accepted, they should be celebrated. I'm just going to suggest to you that our text today won't allow that for just men and women guarding and maintaining marital fidelity and moral purity, it matters. The people of God approach the marriage bed with reverence and care. And lastly, worship morality. And the third area of a man's life that shows that he's righteous is his character.

If you want to summarize verses seven and eight, is being a good neighbor. All of this list, I'm gonna give you a list of four things. And it just means if you're. When you have the opportunity to do it, when you find yourself in a position of authority, when you think that you can make a decision and nobody will see, you'll benefit from it. Somebody else loses, you win, and it's just an even transaction.

God says, I want you to think about this. No oppressing the indebted. No stealing or violence, by the way, no stealing. That's commandment number eight. There's the fourth commandment.

Shall not steal. No neglecting to help the disadvantaged. No exploiting by collecting interest. I want to talk to the business owners in this room and go. You know that when nobody else is looking and you have all the discretion and all the power, and you make a decision that takes money away from the business and gives it to yourself, that's in an unjust way and nobody else knows about it.

I want to tell you that God still sees that when you have a client or a customer and they're so weak and they're so disadvantaged that you can cheat them and nobody else knows, I want you to know that God knows. And I want to say that it's our testimony that matters, that our worship and our morality and our character must be watched and guarded and maintained and repented of when we find these weaknesses. Golden rule, that sucker. You treat others the way you want to be treated. You love your neighbor as yourself.

Others are treated with kindness. They're treated with generosity. They're treated with justice. If I'm going to summarize all of this in one phrase, it's this. He consciously avoids the prevailing sins of the age.

I want to ask you, is that you? Because here's the final verse of our text today. Ezekiel 18 nine. If he's walked in my statutes, if he's kept my judgments faithfully, he's just. He shall surely live, says the Lord God.

I want to bring it full circle. And I want to remind you that Hezekiah was a just man, and God gave him 15 more years of life. It was so wicked under Manasseh that God couldn't wait to put an eight year old boy on the throne who would eventually bring the greatest revival they ever saw life. And I leave you with one final verse. Habakkuk two, four.

It is the just who will live by faith. It's about for prayer. We're going to have a baptism and something more awesome stuff before we leave. But then I'm gonna ask you this. Don't let the enemy steal the seed of what was just preached to you.

These three areas of a person's life that show is righteousness. And if God pressed the button and put some pressure on you at any of those points, how you worship, what your morality's like when nobody's looking, and what your character's like, he's saying, look, I want you to come forward when this service adjourns and let some grace filled brothers and sisters pray for you. That you'll leave here strengthened where you were weak and encouraged where you were sad. Let the people of God and the ordinary means of grace minister to you as we pray for one another later. In Jesus name.

Amen.

Thank you, Trevor. We are about to have a baptism, and so I would like for you to help me welcome to the stage Chloe Herrian.

This is Chloe, and I am so excited that she's up here. And Chloe may have a few friends or family that are here to witness her be baptized today. Hey, if you're here as a special guest of Chloe, would y'all raise your hand so that we can welcome these folks? Thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate you being here.

I bet you're glad they're here, too, huh? All right, well, I would like to read to you part of Chloe's testimony of her faith in Jesus Christ. Just going to hit some highlights here. Before I knew Jesus, I was lost in living for all the wrong things. I was not a good person to myself or others.

And I understand that now, growing up, I knew there was a God, but I didn't know anything past that. Then she goes on to say, but one day I was feeling absolutely hopeless, and I decided to do something I had probably never done before. I prayed, and the Lord answered her prayer and began to minister to her soul. And she says, soon after that, my friend invited me to this youth group. And for the first time ever, my eyes were opened and I finally understood the true power, power of Jesus.

And then the Lord saved her. And now she's quoting bible verses. Galatians 220. That's also one of my favorite verses. It's the part that you didn't quote.

That's one of my favorites. You quoted the first half of it, and it's awesome. I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. She says, it could not get more true than that.

I am no longer who I was before I met the Lord Jesus. Physically, I'm the same person, but Jesus Christ has given me a new life and soul. Golly, Chloe, thank you for sharing that testimony. I want to ask you in front of these witnesses, is it true that you're trusting in Jesus Christ alone for the forgiveness of your sins? Yes.

Well, based on that, my dear sister, we are going to baptize you here in just a moment. Chloe has already signed our member under 18 covenant, so let's pray for her. Heavenly Father, thank you for Chloe. May this be a day that she remembers for the rest of her life. Thanking you in her soul, Lord Jesus, for your willingness to personally die for her and be her substitute.

Bless her. Help us to be a great church to her. I ask in your name, Lord Jesus. Amen. All right, let's step over here.

Our youth pastor, JC Russell, is going to help out here.

Okay, step right there.

Look at me, Chloe, with great joy and in obedience to our Lord Jesus Christ, I baptize you now in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen. How about that? Hey, we are concluding the service, and a couple things I wanted you to know before we dismiss is this welcome card. Make sure you fill this out. If you've been here a hundred times, if this is your first time, we'd love to know you're here worshiping with us.

And hey, you might want to be interested. You might be inspired by this baptism and think, hey, you know what? I've never done that in my life. I want to see what that's all about. If you just write, I'm ready to be baptized right there at the bottom, a little checkbox, and we will help you walk that journey.

We would love to join with you in that. If this is your first time here, we have a gift for you in the lobby. It's by this big. You belong here table. Swing by there.

There's someone there that would love to introduce you to themselves, get to know you just for two minutes. It won't take very long. And they want you to leave with the gift. Beautiful gift we have for you already set up. Small group signups are also happening right now.

You can scan that QR code or you can mark. I want to get to know people at great commission church by joining the group and we'll get you that information this week. We'll have the prayer ministry team up here up front. No rush at all. So they'll come up here.

You can just come receive prayer and then everyone else will be dismissed. So if you stand with me, I want to pray for you one more time. Prayer ministry team, come on forward. Let's pray. God, we are thankful in Jesus name, together with the saints.

God, you answer prayers if we just ask. And today we're going to ask on each other's behalf. So we minister and pray for each other at the front. And Lord, God be mighty in this place. We love you in Jesus name, amen.

Come on forward to receive prayer. You are dismissed.