Psalms for the Summer | How Much Do You Want? | Psalm 81

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Well, thank you, Pastor Joshua. Thank you, worship team, for leading us.

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If any of you have ever wondered whether or not I wear mascara, the answer is obviously no, because if the answer was yes, it would be running down my face right now.

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What a wonderful passage and what a wonderful song. I hope that it ministered to you the way that it did to me.

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If you have a copy of God's Word this morning, I want to invite you to turn with me to the book of Psalms, chapter 81.

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Psalm, chapter 81.

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The title of my message this morning comes in the form of a question.

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How much do you want?

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How much do you want?

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Do you love the Lord this morning?

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Do you enjoy Him?

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Do you enjoy His presence, His promises, the promises one of which we just sang about, do those ring true in your heart? Do you relish them and cherish them as life?

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Do you rejoice in His provision to the degree that He intends for you to?

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I have met many people and many here who as far as I can tell truly love the Lord,

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that they desire to love the Lord with all their heart and all their soul and all their mind and strength,

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and they evidence that with the way that they read their Bibles. They read and study their Bibles like they're eating a meal,

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and they pray like their life depends on it, and they share God's Word and encourage other people.

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They're a blessing. They're encouragement to many. They reflect the character of God among His people. In fact, if you go back to the passage of the pastor preached last week from Psalm 67, it's possible for people to think more highly of God because of what they see in those people.

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I've also met some, not necessarily here,

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who appear to just want the bare minimum when it comes to the Lord. I mean, they want to go to heaven when they die. They want to experience a minimal degree of suffering while on the earth, but it's almost as if their motto is, "I'm a Christian, but I do what I want."

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They often attend church. They might sing. They might give, but their hearts look for security and satisfaction in many different things that are not God.

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If you were being honest with yourself and with the Lord this morning, I would ask you which one of those two scenarios seems more like yours.

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When it comes to the Lord, how much of Him do you want?

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That's the question.

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The good news for us this morning is that there is a way that we can tell, a way that we can answer this question, and also a way that we can tell if we're out of line with the Lord that we can get back in line with Him. If we are starting off in a bad place, we don't have to finish there.

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This Psalm, Psalm 81, and really worship in general, is not designed merely to give us a fuzzy feeling.

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Its purpose is to call for commitment, for self-assessment,

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both inside the church and outside.

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The context for this Psalm, the situation within which it was written, is that God's people would often celebrate national holidays.

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They would look back at those specific moments in time when God had intervened among His people, when He had done incredible things, and they would mark that day on the calendar, and every year when that day would roll around, they would have a feast. They would have a celebration. They would sing particular songs. This appears to be one of those songs.

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And it's a call for us today to review our past,

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to consider our future,

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and to evaluate our current circumstances and responses.

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And so this really does come to us as a word of hope,

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especially to anyone who will listen to the words and respond appropriately.

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Let's read it together beginning in verse 1, Psalm 81,

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"To the choirmaster according to the Gethath," or of Asaph,

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"Sing aloud to God our strength,

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shout for joy to the God of Jacob,

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raise a song, sound the tambourine,

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the sweet lyre with the harp, blow the trumpet at the new moon, at the full moon on our feast day.

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For it is a statute for Israel, a rule of the God of Jacob.

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He made it a decree in Joseph when he went out over the land of Egypt."

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And here you see the writer shift.

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There's a voice that's heard,

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and it's to be understood as the voice of the Lord. So the writer transitions from talking about the Lord, talking about God's people, to the Lord speaking Himself.

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He writes, "I hear a language, I had not known."

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And God speaks, and He says, "I relieved your shoulder of the burden.

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Your hands were freed from the basket.

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In distress you called, and I delivered you.

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I answered you in the secret place of thunder. I tested you at the waters of Meribah.

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Here, O my people, will I admonish you. O Israel, if you would but listen to me,

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there shall be no strange God among you. You shall not bow down to a foreign God. I am the Lord, your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.

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Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it."

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But my people did not listen to my voice. Israel would not submit to me.

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So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts to follow their own counsels. And my people would listen to me. That Israel would walk in my ways.

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I would soon subdue their enemies and turn my hand against their foes.

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Those who hate the Lord would cringe toward Him, and their fate would last forever. But He would feed you with the finest of wheat, and with honey from the rock I would satisfy you.

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And Lord, we ask You this morning,

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by the power of Your Holy Spirit,

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to impress this Word upon our hearts, to give us light, to give us sight, to give us understanding.

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Lord, help us to know not just where we stand, but all that is promised in You.

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Help us to hear these words written long ago to be a word for us. Speak, Lord, for we are listening.

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We ask this for Your sake in Jesus' name, and all God's people said. Amen.

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The first thing I'd like to draw attention to in this passage is a record of God's providence, a record of God's care. That word "providence" is just a big word that describes how specific God has been in the way that He's cared for His people, that He governs over them, that He oversees them, that nothing slips by His attention or His intervention.

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God is in charge, and He lists some ways that He's revealed that.

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The people, verse 7, it says they just called out in distress. You see this at the end of Exodus, chapter 2, that the people were weary and that they called out to the Lord and that He heard them.

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The people called out and God had answered them.

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They praise Him in this song because He has given them freedom. He has liberated them from a land of slavery, from identity as slaves, from hard labor underneath a harsh taskmaster.

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They have been rescued.

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You cannot understand the story of Israel without understanding that part,

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that according to prophecy that they ended up in Egypt for 400 years and they were led out not by their intelligence, not by their number, not by their strength, but by the mighty arm of God.

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And when you think about that Red Sea passage, as they walked up to that sea, they were being chased by the people who formally controlled them.

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The waters split. They walk through on dry ground. They get to the other side. The waters close in over the people that were chasing them, and they're free. They have a new identity.

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God goes on with them into the wilderness, and He provides for every one of their needs. And He tells them right there at Mount Sinai just weeks into their journey that you are no longer... Imagine 400 years it had been impressed into them that they were less than human.

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And all of a sudden they're hearing God thunder from the mountain, that you are a nation, a kingdom of priests, that you exist to reflect my character. You're not fractions of men, you are mirrors of God's character.

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That would be earth shattering. What a paradigm shift in their minds to have to transition from being beaten down on a regular basis to now being lifted up to a place even above angels, even above creation. David wrote in Psalm chapter 8, "Oh Lord, oh Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth." And we think, right with our minds, how does God show His majesty? Well, it must be in the ocean, it must be in the mountains, it must be in the planets. But the climax of Psalm 8 is that He makes His majesty known through His image bearers.

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If you want to know how incredible God is, the first place you look is not to nature, it's not to the universe, it's at one another.

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And just as a parenthetical statement, that's why we don't skip church.

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Because we don't see the majesty of God out in all the other places. We're reminded of who we are and what we're for when we gather, and when we lock eyes with one another knowing we're in different places in life and we're going through different hardships, different joys, different sorrows. We remind ourselves of the things we know to be true when we're together.

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And so when they gather to sing this song, they're reminded of these things.

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God has revealed Himself to them that He's not a God that's made with human hands.

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He's not a block that's been carved. He's not a painting on the side of a building. He is the living God who always was and always will be and always is now.

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That's their God.

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He has promised victory over their enemies.

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He has promised to join forces with them. If they're on His team and He's got an enemy, well by just de facto, that enemy of God becomes their enemy.

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If you want to be on God's team, you can't cozy up to His enemies.

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And it's the same way with Him. He promises that He will be with them and that He will take care of their enemies. They don't have to fight for themselves.

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Every challenge that they come up with, He never promises them ease,

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but He promises them His presence. And with His presence is not only fullness of joy but victory.

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And so any barrier that they come up against all of a sudden becomes God's barrier, which is no barrier.

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Asaph writes this. You'll see that. And Asaph was appointed by David to continue leading the worship of Israel after David and into Solomon's reign.

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You see his name affixed to several of these Psalms.

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He's reviewing these works of the Lord to stir up within the heart just how big, how awesome, how wonderful, how majestic God is. And in doing that, in being reminded of who God is and how God is, it starts to put into perspective the other concerns we have, the other pulls we have, the other priorities we might have, and we start to see how small and foolish those are compared to the sheer size and the weight of God.

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And so He starts really well here.

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He gives a record of God's providence. I wonder, you don't have to answer out loud, if you had to start lining out the ways that God has been good to you in your life, what would you say?

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How has the Lord been good to you?

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You could start with the circumstances surrounding your birth, your upbringing, your life, your career.

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Pastor Sam prayed this earlier. When we line out, it's good for us to look back and to see all the ways that God has been faithful because we know that He does not change.

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And since He doesn't change, surely goodness and mercy will follow us all the days of our lives.

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Some of you may find it very easy to list out some of those things and some may find it difficult. Maybe life has been hard for you.

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And so maybe the question shifts at that point to how has the Lord sustained you through such difficulty?

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It's good for us. It was good for them and it's good for us to look back and to review a record of God's providence. Second, I see reminders of God's promises.

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God's people had indeed inherited great advantages because of their relationship to the Lord.

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But in this passage, as I read earlier, it's apparent that they have drifted.

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And this is their error. This is where it began.

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You don't just wake up in the morning and decide, "I think being one of God's people and having this wonderful God, I think I'm just going to wake up and carve something out of a stick and worship that today."

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That decision doesn't just happen in a vacuum.

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It began with something that the Lord addresses a few times here in this passage. In verse 8, He says, "Hear, my people."

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The second half of that verse, "If you would just listen to me."

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Verse 11, "My people did not listen to me. Israel would not submit." Verse 13, "Oh, that my people would listen to me, that Israel would walk in my ways." It begins, their error begins with not listening to the Lord, not taking Him at His word for whatever reason.

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And what He's saying in this passage is,

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"Listen, just hear me out."

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You have the God of the universe pleading with His people to simply give Him an audience,

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which is crazy when you think that this is a song, right, that they were singing as a symbol, as a worshiping people, and their lips are full of words about how great God is, but their hearts are distant.

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How in the world could this happen?

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How does it happen?

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It could be because they were stubborn.

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Maybe they thought that they knew better. Maybe they thought that they could handle the pressure being pulled in different directions. It's like, "Oh, it's not that big of a deal. It's okay. If I compromise in these areas, I'm still one of God's favorite people."

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Maybe they thought the Lord was making an empty threat. Maybe they thought that He would forever be patient and just continue to overlook their idolatry.

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And that's what it was.

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I know in our culture we like to try to soften terms to take away their sting.

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I won't give examples.

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But these are people that have turned from the Lord.

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Their instruction is now coming from the culture around them instead of the Lord.

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And because they're following the culture, they're also following the culture's priorities.

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And you see this over and over in the Old Testament.

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They've got one of those desires that we have for whatever reason. Maybe the insecurity of Exodus just never got out of them. Maybe it's just something that's inherent in a flawed person. You see this insecurity. They constantly wanted to be like the people around them.

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That special relationship that they had with the Lord just never seemed to fit right with them

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because they wanted what everybody else had.

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They wanted to do what the other people did. They wanted to fit in.

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They wanted a king because God wasn't enough.

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And that was their goal. They wanted to be like the people around them. They wanted to fit in. And that was the motive that shapes these decisions time and time. Every book in the Old Testament just about, that's what you see.

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Despite God's promises, His provision, all the different ways that He acts on their behalf. That's how you see them responding.

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This stopping the ears to the Lord and choosing instead what we see with our physical eyes and embracing that, that's the root of their disobedience, the root of our disobedience. And it turn, it eventuates into just full-blown idolatry.

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And even when we claim the Lord with our lips but our lives are disconnected, we may have this form of Christianity that's really like a folk religion

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that ends up looking nothing like the Christianity of the New Testament.

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How does it happen among God's people?

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It begins. You look at the right angle, right, and it's 90 degrees. But when you look at those two lines that emerge, you try to measure it or whatever, just by the end of those lines it looks vast, but it begins with one slight little departure.

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And over time it just leads in a drastically different direction.

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I mean, how many of us could look at times in our life when that has been us, when we were faced with a decision that didn't seem big at the moment, but we took one of two paths and it ends up five, ten, twenty years down the road leading in a drastically different direction than what we had imagined, for good or for bad.

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They didn't want to make the adjustments necessary to truly listen to and follow the Lord. And he's a good parent, right? He's a faithful father. So he does equate listening with obedience. Amen?

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If we don't obey, we haven't heard.

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They were fine claiming the Lord with their lips so long as they didn't have to drop their idols.

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Gods who couldn't save couldn't sustain them, and yet they still gather together as God's people, chirping these words to the Lord on His special day while clutching idols.

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You see the paradox, how crazy this seems? And God allowed it.

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He allowed it because He will not violate our ability to either obey or disobey. He's not going to have these forced robots of people.

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How did He do this? Verse 12, "He simply gave them over to their stubborn hearts." He ended up giving them what they wanted.

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Sometimes God giving us what we want is not a blessing. Sometimes it is an act of judgment.

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You see it again in Romans chapter 1. Only in Romans chapter 1, it's Godless people who are worshiping the idols, and God continually gives them over, and gives them over, and gives them over. And they continue to go down this downward spiral of sin until they just degenerate. They look nothing like what God intended.

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And God tells the people in Romans chapter 1, He tells through Paul, He's telling the original audience, "Oh, this isn't just like the Godless pagans that have never heard the gospel preached." He turns His attention in chapter 2 over to God's chosen people, the Jews, and said, "You're no different." And we see here, they are no different. They're acting like Godless people despite this privileged relationship that they have.

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But He doesn't respond with anger like He's going to kill an ant with a sledgehammer.

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He responds with mercy.

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There's this beautiful invitation that He gives in verse 10.

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"I am the Lord your God who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.

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Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it."

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Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.

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What does it mean to listen to the Lord? What does it mean to hear Him? What does it mean to pursue Him?

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A great illustration of that is to feed upon Him.

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He says, "Open." He appeals to their ability.

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He says, "Open." I'm not going to force myself on you.

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Open your mouth. He appeals to their appetite. Open your mouth. You see that over and over in the Psalms, right? His word comes to us, "It's sweet like honey."

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Open your mouth. It's a picture of desire, of inclinations, of appetite.

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You'll never open your mouth to a God that you're not hungry for.

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And so He says, "Open your mouth." He appeals to their capacity wide.

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Open your mouth wide. And then what does He say? "I will fill it." No room left.

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How much do you want?

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You see, the Lord's not going to fill a mouth or a heart that's closed.

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Right? That's going to be... How many of you have fed babies, toddlers before? You've played the game, and you've done all the things, and you've done the motorboat, and you've done the plane, and you try to fly it around. And at the end of the day, if they don't want the asparagus, they're not going to eat it.

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It's going to end up all over the place.

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Is that the way that the Lord has to treat us? He won't.

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He won't fill a closed mouth. He won't fill an already full mouth.

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See, some of us don't have much hunger left to give to the Lord, because we are so full of all the other stuff and things and pursuits around us. He doesn't have any room in our lives, and we haven't yet experienced the frustration of those substitute saviors letting us down. So we just keep nibbling ourselves lost.

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He won't fill a closed heart, a full heart, a false heart, or a half heart.

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He says to these people, right, when they're in the middle of,

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I mean, this is the days of Solomon, they're about to go into basically a period of Judges, Part 2, because the kings were just as messed up as the judges were. You have a good one and a bad one, and they experience, like, times of success. They get satisfied in that, and they start practicing idolatry. They get an enemy that comes along, and they're in captivity, and they cry out for deliverance, and God saves them. I mean, it's this cycle over and over and over, all throughout the Old Testament.

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And some of that's coming, right? Babylon and Assyria haven't happened yet.

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But He's saying to them, "I will give you as much as you want."

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And friends, that is the same promise that He gives to us today.

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Here's our takeaway truth for the morning.

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You can have as much of the Lord as you want.

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I'm going to back that up over the next few minutes.

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But here's the promise. Not only do you already have as much of the Lord as you want,

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but you can have as much of the Lord as you desire.

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The question is, how much do you want?

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We see here a necessary response for God's people, a response for God's people. This psalm is a call for reflection, for repentance, for renewal.

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We see here that the Lord is ready to rescue those who will recognize their wrongdoing and rely upon Him for help. All they have to do is acknowledge it and turn from it.

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And that's all that He wants. Do you realize that that's all that God wanted in the past? That's all that He wants now. That's all that He desires of us, a people who will simply listen to Him, believe Him, and walk in His ways.

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He is not a harsh taskmaster.

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Following the Lord is not a buzzkill.

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A people who believe that He knows what He's talking about,

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a people who believe that He's looking out for their best interests.

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I'm a parent now.

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I love my boys. I'm so proud of my boys, but they often remind me of how much of a knucklehead I was when I was growing up. Not because they're knuckleheads, but because God has been merciful to me and given me sons that are much better than I was.

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And you know the deal. You know how you go through your teen years and you get into your 20s and you start having kids and then you start looking back and it's like, "Oh, that's what was happening." And you start having to rehearse the "I'm sorry" speech to your parents.

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Like, they, a lot of the time, knew what they were talking about.

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They had my best interests in mind.

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Oh, man, did I mess that up.

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It's one of the ways we learn. It's one of the ways that we grow.

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Think about the Lord.

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How much greater sense is that His experience?

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You don't have to wonder whether or not He has your interests in mind,

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whether or not He's going to be good to you, whether or not when He says no to something that He's not going to bring about something that is much better both for you and for His glory.

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He's not new at this.

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And He's batting a thousand.

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Why would we ever think that we could invent better ways to do this?

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It's how powerful the human heart is. Deceitful. We deceive ourselves.

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And all that God wants is a people that knows that He cares about them, that He loves them, that He's working for their good, that He's not holding out on them,

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that He intends only their freedom and their flourishing.

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Like them, He wants us, first of all, to choose what is better,

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to choose what is better.

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God's intentions toward us remain the same that He had with Israel. He desires a people who would faithfully reflect His character and extend His kingdom all over the planet.

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That hasn't changed.

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While their feasts called for God's people to remember His faithfulness, they all the while pointed toward a greater fulfillment at a future time.

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All of those feasts, all of those special days, even the deliverance from Egypt, that greater fulfillment came to us in the person of Jesus Christ.

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He is the true and greater Passover lamb who was slain for the sins of His people.

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Jesus began a new exodus, leading people from a spiritual Egypt into a spiritual Canaan, a kingdom that will never end.

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He is the better manna and the living water that satisfies us, not for one day, but for eternity.

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And He dwells among His people not in a tent made by human hands, but by His Spirit who takes up residence within us.

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Brothers and sisters, I would say we have the advantage.

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When the Lord tells us with New Testament eyes, "Open your mouth wide and I will fill it," He is pointing toward the one who offered Himself as the bread of life.

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Jesus said to them, John 6, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will not hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst."

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Verse 56, "Whoever feeds on my flesh, drinks my blood, abides in me, and I in him."

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Jesus would say in Matthew 5, verse 6, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, who go on staying hungry and thirsting for righteousness, for they and they only will be satisfied."

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He wants us to choose what is better, to not be like the people in Jeremiah 2, verse 13, "that forsake what God has provided and instead cut out for ourselves these cisterns for water, broken cisterns that hold no water."

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A second way to respond is He wants us to receive what is promised.

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God desires for you to simply receive what is promised in light of all that God wants to offer us. If you look at all the things that we acknowledged about God when we were talking about the record of His faithfulness and what He did in the people of Israel, all of that merely a foretaste of what He's done for His people in Christ,

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why would we not want to receive what He promises in Him?

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That word "believe" is interesting. I think in our culture many times we think of belief as merely an intellectual understanding.

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"Believe" is a compound Latin word by life.

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It's to so agree with something and so take it on to yourself that it's made evident by life. So a friend of mine used to say it this way, "You don't believe anything that you don't live by."

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That could be said of the people of Israel during this time, right? They're saying these empty words because they weren't living by what they were saying about the Lord.

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But what if we truly, what if we took this verse, "Open your mouth wide, I will fill it." What if we feasted upon the realities of who God intended for us to be in Genesis, chapter 1? What it means to be an image bearer of the Lord.

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And all that was lost with our initial rebellion in the garden,

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that we went from being representatives of the Lord to representatives of the enemy,

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that we traded in our identity as image bearers for an identity as a slave to sin.

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But what if we relished in that joy of what the Bible says about sin, that even though all of us are Psalm 51, we are conceived in iniquity,

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all of us we've turned and we've gone our own way, Romans chapter 3, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,

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but are redeemed now by the life and the death and the burial of Jesus Christ,

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that that sin is forever canceled when He becomes Savior, not just to the general population, but specifically to us,

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that that sin is washed away and forgiven, that even when we sin after we come to know the Lord, that we merely confess that sin to the Lord. And He is faithful and He is just to both forgive that sin and to cleanse us from all iniquity.

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What if we really believed that and lived it and reflected that?

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Salvation, merely calling upon the name of the Lord, that we can be saved and that He transforms us. We go from being 1 Corinthians chapter 15 verse 49, just as we were created in the image of the man of death, we will be created in the image of the man of heaven, and that he is working by his Holy Spirit, 2 Corinthians 3 verse 18.

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He is transforming us little by little by his Holy Spirit. And that one day, 1 John chapter 3 verse 2, that when we see Jesus, we'll recognize Him because we'll be like Him.

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And then until then, we have open access with Him. Hebrews 4 tells us that we don't shrink back out of fear, but Jesus has cleared the way so that we can enter into the throne room in confidence

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and take our request to Him.

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That we're heirs, that in Jesus, Ephesians chapter 1 verse 3, that every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places has been made ours in Christ.

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Those are the ways that the Lord feeds us.

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Last, He wants us to enjoy what is given.

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How do we respond? We choose what is better. We receive what is promised. We enjoy what is given.

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Enjoy Him.

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Enjoy Him. Do you enjoy the Lord?

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Psalm chapter 107 verse 9, He satisfies the longing soul, the hungry soul He fills with good things.

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Psalm 34a, "O taste and see that the Lord is good,

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blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him."

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You can have as much of the Lord as you want. How much do you want? Because He has revealed Himself fully to us in the person of Jesus. He's not holding anything back. He has extended Himself fully, and all we have to do is open.

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And the wider we open, the more we get of Him.

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I'll tell you the story and I'll finish.

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So, four years ago, I was watching headline news.

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Is headline news still on TV?

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Who knows? So many channels now. Headline news, you could get all the news, the big news in 30 minutes. I watched headline news three times consecutively to get all the details on this story.

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Several years ago, there was a couple named Barry and Alyssa.

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Barry and Alyssa went out for dinner at Dr. Salami's restaurant in Pella, Iowa.

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They went into the diner and they sat down to eat, just the two of them. And all of a sudden, an elderly gentleman walked up to their table and stood over and looked at them. And he looked, he fixed his attention on Alyssa and he said, "Excuse me, do you have any children?"

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In 2025, we call that creepy.

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But she volunteered the information.

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"Excuse me, do you have any children?" They had never seen him before. Nobody in the restaurant knew who he was.

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And she said, "We do. It's a daughter and she's two."

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The gentleman didn't say anything else. He reached into his pocket, grabbed a checkbook, he tore out a check, put it down on the table, signed his name, slid it across the table, and he said to Barry and Alyssa, "You fill in the amount. I'm good for it." And he turned around and walked out of the restaurant.

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I love "What If" games. If I would have been sitting at the table, I'm looking for cameras. Like, this has got to be a joke. Stuff like this doesn't happen to me.

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He walked out. They took the check home and they deliberated what do we do with this and they decided that they were going to write in $100,000.

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And so they did. They wrote 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, and took it to the bank. What do you think happened?

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Check cleared.

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They're $100,000 richer.

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Now here's where the game gets dangerous.

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What if they would have put different numbers?

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What if they would have put a 2 or a 5 or an 8? And I know how some of you are thinking, some of you are successful business people, and you're thinking, "Forget that. Add zeros.

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Save the time. Add the zeros."

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Here's the deal.

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Barry and Alyssa, as sweet as they are and as blessed as they now are, they were limited by two things.

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They were limited by their vision and their trust. Their vision.

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The size of their request.

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And they were limited by whether or not they would trust the account holder to actually be good for it, because it would have been a terrible prank if they would have written in this big amount and then the check bounce.

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Brothers and sisters, we're limited by those same two things. When it comes to feeding on the Lord, how much we want and whether we truly believe He's going to come through for us.

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You can have as much of the Lord as you want.

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How much do you have?

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Let's pray together.

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Lord, thank You for this word to us. Thank You for speaking to us. Thank You for the presence of Your Holy Spirit.

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Thank You for this necessary reminder that for all the needs that we have, we find our ultimate fulfillment in the provision You've offered us in Jesus.

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Lord, help us not to approach You with a half heart, with a full heart, but Lord, help us feast upon You, to open wide to You.

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This morning, if you realize in your heart that you are looking for satisfaction in all the wrong places, I want to invite you to fix your eyes upon Jesus.

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He is the best answer to this prayer.

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He will save you. He will fill you. He will transform you. He will not just give you life. He will be life to you.

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You call out to Him from your heart.

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Maybe this morning you realize that you know the Lord, but your heart's become hard.

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Or maybe you want to pray for someone.

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Maybe this was a good word for you, a good reminder.

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Then I want to invite you to come to these steps and pray as our worship team prepares.

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Just you before the Lord, ask the Lord, "Lord, would You help me to open my heart to the degree that You want to fill me?

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Lord, give me more." Give me more. Would You ask the Lord to give you more of Himself?

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Lord, I pray that all around this room that You would speak to our hearts, that You would take us to new places of obedience, that You would bless us.

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We ask this for Your sake in Jesus' name.

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Amen.

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Our pastors, leaders are here at the front. If the Lord's working in your heart and you want to come, you want to pray, if you want to talk to someone, you come and we'll pray for you.

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Psalms for the Summer | How Much Do You Want? | Psalm 81
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