Comfort, O comfort, my people," says your God. Speak kindly to Jerusalem and call out to her that her warfare has ended. Her iniquity has been removed, that she has received of the Lord's hand double for all her sin. A voice is calling, clear the way for the Lord and the wilderness, make smooth in the desert a highway for our God. Let every valley be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low. Let the rough ground become a plain, and the rugged terrain a broad valley. Then the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all flesh will see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. Verse 9, Get yourself up on a high mountain, O Zion bearer of good news. Lift up your voice mightily, O Jerusalem bearer of good news. Lift it up. Do not fear. Say to the cities of Judah, here is your God. Behold the Lord, God will come with might, with his arm ruling for him. His reward is with him, his recompense before him. Like a shepherd he will tend his flock, in his arm he will gather the lamb, and carry them in his bosom. He will gently lead the nursing youth, and go to Psalm 24th, 24th Psalm, and we'll read that together as well. David writes, The earth is the Lord and all it contains, the world and those who dwell in it, for he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the river. Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord, and who may stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not lifted up his soul to falsehood and is not sworn deceitfully. He shall receive a blessing from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of his salvation. This is the generation of those who seek him, who seek thy faith, even Jacob. Now I want you to see the next four verses were meant really for antiphonal singing, and the way that this is arranged is that a choir, you have the picture of a choir processing, and as they possess, as if up to a city, as they would be singing, lift up your heads o' gates, be lifted up o' ancient doors, that the king of glory may come in, and then a voice would ring out from out inside the city wall, who is the king of glory? And another voice from outside the herald would announce, it's the Lord, strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle, and then the choir would sing together, together. Lift up your heads o' gates, and lift them up o' ancient doors, that the king of glory may come in, and then the voice from inside the gates, who is the king of glory? And then all together would shout, it's the Lord of hosts, he is the king of glory. Amen. Be seated, please. Surely, you know what it is to yearn, yearning is part of the human condition. We yearn for days gone by. We yearn as we get older for experiences and feelings, you know, we yearn for the days when you're young, you yearn for the days when your kids will be gone. When you get all the yearn, you remember the days when all the kids were home. We yearn for the memories of old, the feelings of old, by Thanksgiving at grandma's, around grandma's dinner table. For the feeling we felt on the day that school ended every year, it was just no day like that on the calendar. Maybe the beginning of fall, you know, we yearn for those memories. We yearn for the being moved, times that we can recall something really impacting our spirit. We think of a piece of music in the place that we heard it. We think of maybe a romantic encounter with our spouse or someplace where we just connected on some trip or some time away together. Perhaps we yearn for the feeling we had when we first met Jesus and we remember just started this raw excitement and delight in knowing him. We yearn for a world where there's justice and where there's peace and where there's hope and, you know, you ever read the paper in yearn? What do you think a nurse who works in pediatric oncology ward? Do you think she yearns? Do you think she goes to work every day and she applies her heart and her hands and her skill and her knowledge to children who have cancer? And then maybe every week, maybe every month, the children she works on die. Maybe it goes on and it goes on and it goes on. Don't you think she yearns for a world where children don't suffer? Where children aren't sick, where children, where families aren't grieving, we yearn. Sometimes we yearn for what we never had. Yearn for the, a dad to take us to the ballgame. We yearn for a mother's lap to curl up on in church and fall asleep. We are yearning people. See us list said, we long because this world is not our home and because we're all along way from home and in our hearts, we know it, that we were made for another world, the world that doesn't exist anymore. And we were made for a relationship that we don't have, that we're separated from. And it doesn't matter how much we have and how good our marriage is and what kind of possessions and what kind of success we have in our career, we still yearn. Tom Wolf, the author said, the deepest search in life, it seems to me, the thing that in one way or another was central to all living, was man's search to find a father. Not merely the father of his flesh, not merely the lost father of his youth, but the image of his strength and wisdom external to his need and superior to his hunger. We long for a king, something external to our need, the wisdom and strength, external to our need and superior to our yearning and our longing and our hunger, something that can fill and satisfy us like nothing else can. And we yearn for it because we know we were made for this relationship and we don't have it. And it doesn't matter what else we have, Augustine said, our hearts are indeed restless until they find their rest. Indeed, the psalmist said, as the deer pans for the water, so are what, our souls long for the, oh God, we were made to desire a king. And that's why on Palm Sunday, the church ought to feel a sense of anticipation, a sense of excitement, a sense of something brewing, you know, if you live in a big city and you see the police come out in force and you see barricades going up to limit traffic, what do you know is coming? You know some foreign dignitary is coming, very often. You know that they're blocking everything off and they're setting everything up because somebody important is passing through. I don't know if you remember those Jurassic Park movies, but you remember there was one point in the movie where everyone noticed that the water started to shake. I think it was a cup of water on the dashboard. It just starts to tremor and it starts to tremor more and more and more until everyone understood that the consequence of that, something big is coming. The ground is beginning to move. The very foundation is beginning to shake, something momentous, something big is coming. Let's try to feel on Palm Sunday, the king, the creator, the Lord of hosts, the Lord strong and mighty. There ought to be a sense inside of you that you feel your soul shake, that everything my heart longs for, everything I was created for somehow has something to do with this day. So let's study it together. Have a sermon outline. The great king comes. The great king comes, the king that our hearts desire comes to bring restoration. Restoration to what is rightfully his, we would David writes in the first verse of Psalm 24. The earth is, here's a foundational scripture to bed in our minds and hearts. The earth is the Lord and the fullness thereof. Everything is his. He made it. He sustains it. He governs it. He is the king, the Lord, the ruler, the sovereign, the potentate, the earth belongs to him. I want to tell you something, your whole world would change. If you meditated on that and got ahold of that, the earth is the Lord. Everything is the Lord. And the Bible says that he made the earth fertile and green and fruitful and verdant and productive. But that's not the way we find the world today. The world today is a wasteland, it's a desert, it's arid, it's dry, it's a brown, it's unfruitful, and you and I know it. We may live in denial, but then we open the front page of the paper day after day and we read about people who walk into a Jerusalem and then make their bodies into what, bombs. What kind of world do people blow themselves up and others with them? We read of a mother drowning for five children. Are we so callous that this kind of thing doesn't slam us? Have we seen so much TV and so many movies that that that that that that's ceases to be a stud against our spirit to say something's horribly wrong. There's a desert where there's supposed to be life. You see this satellite pictures of this massive bloom or something of black sea moving through southwest Florida off the coast in the water. This massive bloom of scientists don't even know what it is. They just know that it's whatever it is, it's dead. It's death of bringing to the marine culture. We look at it a world that's supposed to be lush and pristine and we see so much. I read this week of a man, a famous author who said when he was 12 years old, it was going to be the best day of his life. His father was taking him to a Notre Dame football game, it was Saturday morning. I mean he looked forward to this, this was dead. Notre Dame football with his dad, except when he got up that morning, he didn't go to the game because his dad killed himself. His dad wrote his family notes, told them all he loved them, left all the kids something and sat out in the garage with the carbon monoxide pumped into the car. He said, what do you do when you're 12 years old and you wake up thinking you're going to a football game with your dad, only to find out they don't even have a dad anymore at his own hand? And you know, we've all got these stories, it's somehow a heartache in our that's excited against our souls, that the powers of hell unleashed against the earth. But Palm Sunday is the day when we see tangible evidence that the armies of heaven have invaded to say this shall not stand. Palm Sunday, the day in which the king comes to reclaim what belongs to him to bring restoration healing and wholeness to his world. Imagine that there's an owner and he has a farm and it's a beautiful farm house and the field they're just filled with fruit and cattle and yet he has to leave and he leaves the farm to another and a tyrant comes to power over this property and the servants are all abused and beaten and many run away and the farm house is in disrepair and he's painting and the shingles are falling off and there's a hole in the roof and the carpets ripped and the paintings are down and the house is disheveled and nothing works and the fields are covered with weeds and it's all destroyed and suddenly you look in the distance and there's a cloud of dust and you realize the owner is coming up the driveway. The owner is coming back to take possession of what is rightfully his and to put everything back the way it was intended to be that's what Palm Sunday is. The Old Testament prophets wrote of this day, they saw this day, they dreamed of the day, they longed for the day. The day when the king would come and restore the and there's a word they use, the king would come to restore the shalom, the peace, the wholeness, the fruitfulness of the world in which he created, the king coming and the ordee, you know, as I wrote this sermon, I asked what do I want the folks here to do with what I'm saying, I just want you to feel the ground shape, I just want you to feel the tremor, I want you to understand the hope with which we live in a world that can be very dark and where evil can seem to prevail in every turn and where the side of difficulty and hardship seems to slam against our life, sometimes again and again where our own weakness and struggle seemed to overwhelm us, I want you to understand as the king has come to make the wilderness flourish again in Isaiah chapter 40, the prophet says, make way, make way, make way for what, when someone shouts make way they mean what, somebody important is coming, make way and there's a highway being built through the desert, the mountains will be made low, the rough places made inhabitable and plain and we get this picture of them even laying their coats out for Jesus coming a sort of picture that to understand the ancient world if a king came to citrus county what did they do first, they built the sun coast parkway, don't you understand that a king didn't go out to the outer regions and travel on a road like any common traveler would travel on, the king wouldn't go down this bumpy road, what kind of king would that be that he'd settle for such, they'd build a boulevard, they'd build a highway, his whole trip was supposed to be nothing but smooth sailing, pleasurable travel, it just showed the authority of the king that wherever he went and so what's Isaiah saying, make the way straight, build the highway, the king's coming and when the king came and they built that road everything flourished, there were trees planted, they made the road beautiful, everything get a picture about here where it was arid and dry and barren, everything would spring to life, this is the prophetic vision isn't it, even in the desert the hand of God would touch and things would come back to life again, now you know you could ask, I've never renovated a house but I suppose anyone that's done it or anyone that's done it a lot or often would say the greatest temptation in any really renovation situation would be to look at it and say, you know there'd be something a lot easier than renovation and what would that be, let's just get a dozer, let's just scrape it off, it'd be a lot easier to just start over from the very foundations and redo this thing, renovation is so hard, so time consuming, why doesn't God do that, why doesn't God look at the world, why doesn't God look at us and say I'm going to flush this away and start over, why doesn't he do that, because he already did and he said he wouldn't do it again, he did that in the flood and he said I will not do it again as foul as the earth has become, it belongs to me and I want it back and so I will gather what's scattered, I will rebuild what's broken, I will restore what's lost, I will turn swords into plowshares, I will see that little children have a world that is secure for them where nations and races treasure their differences, where streets are clean, where politicians held the truth, I mean could there be a world in which there's no Tanya Harding, Paula Jones boxing matches, the answer is yes and what's the evidence of it, if it sounds like because whenever I preach like this there's always people who say give me any evidence that those prophetic visions and dreams and pronouncements are actually coming, isn't our world just getting more and more and more desert like in Barron, the answer is, Palm Sunday, 2,000 years ago, Jesus walked into the world and he said the strong man is bound and we are plundering his house, let the plundering begin and he went from village to village preaching and teaching the gospel of the, he should shout it, he went from village to village all over the Bible, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, the kingdom, the king has come, that was Jesus' message, that's what he came to declare, that's what he came to announce, everywhere he went he preached the gospel of the kingdom, oh guys are good, and and he did the deeds of the kingdom, he fed those who are hungry, he healed those who were lame, he touched those who were blind, the kingdom had come and it's power and Jesus' manifestation people say how do you know, how do we know that the things have been reversed that this wasteland with the greatest evidence is on the third day he rose again from the dead, he's the first roots from the grave, this is the ultimate reversal of the blight of this earth, is it not, the death itself is conquered by King Jesus, who's going to usher his children into this new age of restoration, fruitfulness and wholeness, he comes to make his blessings flow as far as the curse is found, now what's our role, if Christ came to take back ownership of what belonged to him, and this restoration has begun, a restoration that won't be complete until his second coming, what's our role in the intermediate period, it's to be agents of kingdom, restoration, that's why you are saved, that's why you are sanctified, that's why gods at work in your midst is spirit in you, that you might participate in this grand restoration, the earth is the Lord and the fullness thereof, and I have a plan in you to be my co-regions to rule and subdue the earth for the glory and honor of God. Neil Planega writes, some of us retreat into the small world defined by our friends, work, church and family, and build a snuggery there, perhaps on television we watch with disdain or amazement the passing show of misery, novelty and grief, and the larger world outside, but if our insulation is good enough we needn't be significantly disturbed by it, and in any case we do not wish to be inconvenienced by it, we do not welcome strangers into our lives or homes and we do not go out to meet them, we do not grieve over news stories of poverty or starvation and we make only token efforts to relieve such suffering by our charity, claiming allegiance to the Christ who speaks an active imperative, go, tell, witness, declare, proclaim, we Christians nonetheless prefer to keep the bread of life in our own cupboard. Do we subconsciously suppose that in such in-bred silence we can keep our dignity? We cannot cocoon. The goal of the church is not to protect ourselves, to gather and huddle like this and keep the world out. The goal of the church is to go into culture, proclaiming the lordship and glory of Christ. Why do we have a Christian school? People often ask, Christian school, he costs money, it's a major hassle, it's very difficult to do for a church. Why would you do that? The answer is simple. Produce ambassadors for the kingdom, produce kingdom changing agents, future generations of dancers and dentists, thinkers and scholars and military leaders and accountants that are going to go into the world with minds filled with the glory of God having a clear vision of how to use their gifts and talents and abilities as kingdom restorative agents in our world. That's what we're about. We have a Christian school so that we can protect those little darlings from the dangerous world. There's corruption out there, there's MTV and there's this and there's that and we've got to pull them in here and guard them exactly the opposite. We intend to fully traumatize our children. We intend to expose our children to everything in the world so that they can be more than conquerors in Jesus Christ because we're not afraid of the culture, we're not afraid of the world and we're preparing our children to go out into the world and to transform the world not to be conformed by it. That's why we exist. That's why this church exists. What do I want you to do this morning? Tear the ground, shape, the king has come. Do you know what it's like to look out at the world and dream of a world the way it should be? And say that there is a God who is at work in this world and I believe it and I'm not one who walks through this world with my head between my legs just waiting for the rapture to happen, waiting to be sucked up out of this world somehow until God can make all things right just trying to hang on. No, but I am an ambassador of the king who has come into this world and his healing touch has been given. Do you remember in the 1960s an African-American pastor stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, his name was Martin Luther King and he stood there and he said, I have a preference. Was that his message? I have a preference. He said, I am not satisfied. I am not satisfied that black men cannot find lodging in the hotels of this land and have to sleep in their cars at night because they're not admitted. I am not satisfied with the suffering of police brutality. I am not satisfied with a world in which young black children are taught that they're value less having to drink at water fountains for colors only. I am not satisfied. I will not be satisfied until the water rolls down until justice rolls down like the water till righteousness like a mighty stream. Where did he get those words from the book of Amos? Martin Luther King stood that day on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and he quoted Isaiah chapter 40. He said, I have a dream and all the part you're used to hearing is I have a dream that little black children and little white children will hold hands and you know but when he finished all that he said I have a dream that the highway will be cut through the wilderness and the glory of the Lord will be seen and all flesh will see it together. His vision, his dream was infused with the belief that God was at work to transform this world, that there was a world as it should be in which indeed people are judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. What inflamed that activity? Should he have just stayed quiet? Should he have just stayed uninvolved? Should he have just closed his mouth? Should he have just gone to church? No. We cannot cook him. We are the restorative agents of the Lord Jesus Christ in this world. I just want you to feel the ground shake because God's at work. He's moving through this world and wherever he touches it comes to life, the desert comes to life. This week I had the opportunity to go to Sumter Correctional Institution. There are 1,400 male inmates there and it's Sumter Correctional Institution. I went with a man in this church who goes into the lockdown area where prisoners live in a cell less than this size, maybe about half the size of this platform and some of them are there for years. They get out for two showers a week. They get out to exercise one time a week. They have no visitors. They virtually have no human contact except for this man from the church who goes and reaches his hand through their food slot, reaches their hands through the door, meets these guys, prays for them, talks to them about Jesus. We walked into a prison of 1,400 people and we were surrounded for the six hours that I was there by Christian men who wanted to ask questions about Jesus who begged us to come back and teach them doctrine and theology. It's that everybody who comes in this prison, all they do is give a salvation, salvation, salvation, salvation. They said, they think because we're prisoners, we're rotten. We need salvation. They said, we want the rich deep teachings of the Word of God. We'll use them teachers in here to teach us. We're there studying in Moody Bible Institute correspondence courses. They're studying to be Christian counselors. There's a vibrant, here we are in a prison, a warehouse for wasted lives and the church of Jesus Christ is flowering in this wasteland because the king has come and he touches ruined lives and he brings them to wholeness and makes them fruitful again. I just want you to feel the ground shaking. Once you feel the tremors in your soul, this is who our God is. These the king come to restore what he owns. I want to tell you something else though, secondly, he is the king who comes to ransom, to reconcile. That what you love. The passage in Psalm chapter 24 says, if the king, if this righteous and holy great king comes back, who can ascend them to the hill of the Lord? Who can stand in his holy place? Who could even stand before him? It's exciting to talk about him coming back but if he comes back, what chance do we have? If he comes back, what kind of person could even have a relationship with him if he is as holy and righteous and good? The answer is there in verse 4. He who has clean hands and a pure heart. There's the answer. Those who are good on the outside, clean hands, those who are good on the inside and completely good on the outside and completely good on the inside, they could have a relationship with a great king. Uh-oh, a ruck row. Well, who can have a relationship with him then? Because that's not us. We're the people as Isaiah said of unclean lips. We have unclean hands. We have unclean hearts. Look at verse 5. It's the gospel found in the Old Testament. He shall receive a blessing from the Lord. What's a blessing from the Lord? The favor of the Lord, the smile of the Lord and righteousness from the God of his salvation. The righteousness we need to stand before the great king is a gift that the great king brings and gives to us. We don't have it. We have to receive it. So, why do most Christians? You know, something I've been intrigued about for most of my adult life, because I grew up in the churches, why Christians are so sour, why Christians so often church goers at least are so negative and critical is unbelievable the correspondence that you get as a pastor from people who go to church and critical spirited looking for something wrong, finding fault. You know, I feel sorry for school teachers having to deal with parents who are church goers and what's up with that? Well, the problem is that and we get a beautiful picture in the passage we read in Isaiah chapter 40. Isaiah chapter 40 comes after 39 chapters of Isaiah, describing the judgment of God on the people of God, 39 chapters. And you get the chapter 40 and the Bible says comfort ye my people. And boy, we need it by that point. Comfort ye my people because the warfare is over, your iniquity has been covered, you will receive. It's right there in your outline, double for all your sins. But that doesn't sound very comforting does it? You'll get double for all your sins. Well, double doesn't mean double punishment because God would never punish. That would be unjust. Nowhere in the Bible doesn't say God would punish us double. There's double what? There's double blessing. There's double covering for our sins. Now, what does that mean? A double blessing. Here's the problem with the church. Most of the church doesn't understand this. Most of the church, if you ask them and try it yourself, go out and ask people you know our Christians. If you were to stand before God and you were to say, why should I let you into heaven? What will they say? I'm going to heaven because Jesus did what? Jesus died for my sins. That's all they get. Is that I have a pardon? My sins have been taken away. That's the extent of their Christian life, which means that if Jesus came and took my sins away, that for daily, my daily relationship with God to have a good record with God to experience his smile and his love, I've got to what? Produce. I've got to provide a good record. Jesus takes my bad record away, but I've got to provide a good record with my life. And since I'm not capable of doing that, the only way I can really feel good about myself is looking around myself all the time and finding out what's wrong with everyone else. And it becomes a way of life for most people who go to church because they know Jesus took their bad record away, but they've got to produce a good record and they can't do it. And it's the way they live. They find fault with everything else to try to deal with the guilt of the fact that they're not the kind of person they ought to be and they need to be to have God love them. But you know what it says? It says, I will give you double for your sin. If you're on death row and the governor pardons you, guess what? That's an awesome thing. You're no longer going to be held liable for your crime. But you know what? If you walked out of the gate to the prison, nobody would hire you and nobody would let you marry their daughter. So you're off the crime, but you don't have a good record. Nobody would celebrate you. They would have parades in your honor, right? That's the way most Christians live. They think they've been pardoned by the death of Jesus, but they don't understand that all the honor, all the treasuring that Jesus would have experienced from the father as the beloved son who obeyed his father at every point. That record has been given to us. That's the double blessing. We're not just not liable for our sins. We get all the credit for Jesus' perfect life. So that we become the jewels in God's eyes. You know, it even seems incomprehensible to say it sometimes. God loves Ray Cortes. God loves to watch Ray Cortes preach. Sounds like you're saying that God looks at you and you think you're so hot. I think Jesus is so hot. And if I am covered by his righteousness, then I have a record. I have the double blessing. To understand what it is, and I ask you this day, are you able to rest in that? Are you able to say, Lord, I believe that? That I am precious to you, that I am a jewel to you, that I am the object of your delight. It's all in Psalm 24. Who can stand the one with clean hands and a pure heart? Who has it? The one who receives the righteous record from God, verse five, he shall receive the blessing from the Lord. He shall be the one who seeks God's face, has a face-to-face relationship with the living God. To understand the importance of that is that this king is coming. He comes to restore, but he also comes to reconcile, to bring you home. You see, the end of Isaiah, chapter 40, that we read together, says, the king comes and he's mighty and he's strong. He has a mighty arm. But what's in that mighty arm? Says he's a shepherd who carries his little lamb. What a picture, the warrior carrying the lamb. That's who our God is, our king is. He is the powerful warrior king who gives us his strength. He is the tender shepherd who picks us up. In case you grew up in a Sunday school room where they had that picture, it's not an actual snapshot of Jesus by the way, but they had that picture, you know, of some artist representation of a Jesus who looked strangely Germanic, European, carrying a little lamb. That's you. That's you. You got to feel the ground shaking. That you would be the treasured object of God's affection. And so the king comes to reconcile what is his and to restore what he own and he comes to receive what is do him. That's the last point. He comes to receive and here we have the picture of David bringing the ark up into the, you know what Psalm 24 is? It's a picture of the king coming back from battle and he's coming back to his own town. And so before him are the heralds and the trumpeters and they're making great fanfares. The king approaches his own city. And as he approaches the city, his heralds cry out. What? Open the open the gates. Open the gates. You know, it's a citadel city. It's protected by high strong walls and gates. Open the gates. And so the cry comes from inside the city. What? Who goes there? The victorious king is returned. Open the gates. And at the news that the king has come back and he's been victorious in battle. Guess what? They erupt. It's a picture from the Old Testament of David bringing the ark back to Jerusalem where it had been conquered by the Philistines and now it's being brought home. And the Bible says the David did what in front of the ark. He danced. He celebrated. He worshipped. There was exaltation and it's a picture of Jesus coming into Jerusalem mounted on anodonti coming in as a coronation ceremony. People lining the streets. The king coming. Lift up the gates. Open the gates. The king is coming to take possession of his city. Don't you love it when Jesus comes into the city of Jerusalem? Where did he go? First place. He goes to the temple. He throws out the money changers out of the temple and they say, who do you think you are? You act like you own this place. And what did you say? This is my house. This is mine. Kings come. Come back into the world to reclaim what belongs to him and guess what? You belong to him. And he wants your worship. He wants your adoration. He wants your exaltation.
He wants you to give your heart to him. He wants you to dance to sing, to shout, to love, to respond, to a moat. Whether you do it in public worship, whether you do it in private, you better do it somewhere. And you have it in you. Some of you Presbyterians, some of you Episcopalians. You have it in you. I've seen you at the University of Florida games. I've seen you worship. I've seen you at FSU games. I've seen you jump up and down and shout and scream because some 17-year-old scored a touchdown. The king of glory has come in. Give him your worship. Give him your obedience. Declare him to be your king that you will submit to him, that you will yield, that you will say uncle that, that you will denounce your worrying anxiety-prone spirit and recognize that he is the Lord, that you can't run the earth better than he can.
Yield him when I was in prison this week. I met a 21-year-old African-American fellow. He told me a little bit of his story. This young man was educated, articulate, brilliant. He said, listen, I didn't grow up running with the gang, the crowd, the stugs. I didn't live a life of crime. I didn't do any of that. You could tell. I mean, he was a brilliant, educated, gifted young man. He said, I wasn't out. I didn't drugs, drinking none of that. None of that was a part of my life. Fact he was a music director at his church. But he said, one Friday morning, I was at work. And he didn't tell me what. But he said, I did something wrong, and I've been in prison ever since. One day changed my whole life. And he said, but I would not trade that day for anything. Because I was a music director of a church and I grew up the son of a pastor, but I didn't know Jesus till I got in this place. And he said, in this place, I met Jesus personally. And he said, am I angry to be in prison? Am I mad about being in prison? I cherish the fact that I am here. And I have more time than most human beings on the face of this earth to pursue a relationship with Jesus every day. I do not chase under this discipline. I praise God for this discipline because He has brought me to Himself as His Son. Feel the ground shaking? The king has come. He touches lives that are broken and He makes them fruitful. You know what the press is me about living in Citrus County? Trash in the road. The lack of beauty, the lack of caring for. And so whether I walk or whether I drive, there's just trash everywhere. And I look around and I have this feeling of disdain. And then I remember God put me here to do what? Pick it up. Pick it up. Why do we exist to make what God made beautiful a garden again? And that's why you can drive down the road. And you might drive down 44 and you might see trash, trash, trash, trash, but suddenly you'll come to a property where it's green and there's grass and there's flowers and it's all under a sign that says seven rivers church. And why do we do that?
Because we want our whole community to see that wherever the hand of the king has touched everything springs to life. There is a king and he is the very one your heart has always yearned for.
Lift up the gates of your heart and welcome him in. Amen.