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Spiritual Formation

As we face this new year, this has been a scripture that has kind of got me stirred up a little bit, particularly the last part. It says this:

But dear friends, remember what the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ foretold. They said to you in the last times there will be scoffers who will follow their own ungodly desires.

David Stockton
Series: 2020 Fasting Season

(Sermon starts at 11:00 minutes)

As we face this new year, this has been a scripture that has kind of got me stirred up a little bit, particularly the last part. It says this:

But dear friends, remember what the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ foretold. They said to you in the last times there will be scoffers who will follow their own ungodly desires. There are the people who divide you, who follow mere natural instincts and do not have the Spirit. But you, dear friends [Living Streams] by building yourself up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in God’s love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life. Be merciful to those who doubt. Save others by snatching them from the fire. And to others show mercy mixed with fear, hating even the clothing stained by corrupted flesh. Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy to the only God, our Savior, be glory, majesty, power and authority through Jesus Christ our Lord before all ages, now and forever. Amen.

What we’re going to do this year is we’re going to introduce this concept of Christian spiritual formation, discipleship. We’re introducing it—not that we’ve created it. But we’re introducing it as a kind of guidance for our church this year and what we feel the Lord wants to do. Last year we focused on the family as far as our household and the work that needs to be done there, as well as our church as a family and the work that the Lord’s doing there. And this year we’re going to talk about how we can be formed into the image of Christ. The state of our soul. The state of our being. Where it is and where it could be, or where God wants to lead it to be.

I love this verse. It is so important for us to remember as we start to try to move forward in our relationship with Christ is that God is able to present us spotless and with great joy before his glorious presence. It’s not that we just grit it out and summon all of our strength and we just try and try. Resolutions are fine. That’s great. But anything that we are trying to do in our own effort alone falls short. Many of you are trying to diet or get in better shape. Many of you are trying to do this or that, read more books or… How’s that working for you? Is it working good. You’re getting everything you want done. No. We struggle with following through.

But I love what the scriptures say. The promise we’re given here is that God is able. We should rejoice and be glad and worship and praise and rest—that God is able. Listen to what he says:

To present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy…

How fun will it be to stand before the throne of God and your name is called. “Come before the throne, David. Job. Bartholomew.” Whatever your name is. And you walk up there and you’re going before the very presence of God. And in this moment you feel spotless. You feel great joy. That’s God’s plan for your life. That’s the work that Jesus Christ in the power of His Spirit wants to do in you, no matter where your starting point is.

First of all, let’s know that it’s God who wants to do it. It’s God who makes is possible. It’s God who fuels it, funds it and gives us all the energy to do it. It’s all him. But what we’re going to learn is what we can do in this dance with the Lord as he’s trying to get us to this point.

Spiritual Formation. We’re going to define some things.

Christian spiritual formation is the process of moving from less Christ-like to more Christ-like. It’s not complicated. It’s pretty simple. I mean, the process is not simple, but the idea of what God’s trying to do. When we give our life to Christ, what he’s trying to do is to take us from being less Christ-like and causing us to become more Christ-like.

We define being Christ-like as the beautiful heart. We did a whole sermon series on it. You can go back and listen to it on podcast, watch it on video, whatever you want to do. We define the beautiful heart, the heart of Christ, as the humble heart, the helpful heart, the grateful heart and the generous heart. That’s a good vision for 2020. To grow in those things. To help our kids understand the beauty of this versus all the other things they think are beautiful. A humble heart. A helpful heart. A grateful heart. A generous heart.

So we’re going to talk a little bit more about the broken heart. That’s our starting point. That’s what it means to be less like Christ — to have a heart that’s broken, that God can form into a beautiful heart.

The stages of the journey. We’re talking about spiritual formation. It’s a journey. It takes days and decades for us to follow Christ and to experience the formation of Christ. And, hopefully, many of you today are saying, “Well, I’m not where I should be, but I’m not where I was.” And that’s a wonderful thing to be able to say at the end of the year, or the end of a season of your life. That’s what God is trying to do. He’s working it out. He’s working it out. He’s working it out.

There are stages of the journey. This is not something we have come up with. This is over two thousand years of church history in addition to thousands of years before that of a Judaistic approach to the One God. This is unpacking a lot of that. People have put different terms to it. But they understand that there seem to be phases. It’s not necessarily linear phases, even though sometimes it goes that way. But sometimes it’s like cyclical phases of refining what we go through.

But these are some of the phases: We are walking in darkness. That’s where we usually begin. We’re aware that we are in the dark, but that usually is because we’re starting to understand and we have an awakening to the light of God, to the presence of God, to something that God is bringing into our life, which, if we surrender to that, it brings us into a stage of purgation. Now, that’s a fun word, right? No. It’s horrible. But I love it because it describes that process where God is starting to unpack the world in us. In unpacking the world, the flesh and the brokenness, he’s starting to pull those things out and put in something of his nature, something of his love, something of his kingdom. It’s a process. It’s a refining process. It’s challenging. It’s purification.

Then there’s a season of illumination, where, all of a sudden, now, I feel like I’m now able to hear the Lord and know the Lord; and I’m able to see the difference between what is me and flesh, and what is the Lord and his Spirit. it’s this process of illumination that we get to.

Ultimately, the end result, the goal of it all is this super-intimidating word for me: union. When I first heard this, it shocked me. Because I think it’s such a better word than all the words I’d ever come up with. Union with Christ. United with Christ. It’s the goal of all Christian spiritual formation.

Jesus prayed in John 17:

Father, I pray that they would be one with me even as I am one with you.

Which seems like an audacious, ridiculous prayer But that is God’s goal for you and you and you, individually. He wants to be united with you. Now, some of the super-holy people that wrote about all this stuff, talked about it as spiritual marriage. I’m not going to talk about that. It throws me off. But being united with Christ is the goal.

Here’s the beauty of it. I keep thinking that, if we’re really following Christ, we’ll be producing, we’ll be serving, we’ll be sacrificing. We’ll be doing all these things. But no, the goal of God in your life is that you’ll be united with Christ. Jesus says stuff like this in John 15:

If you abide in me and my words abide in you, you will bear much fruit.

So the goal is not bearing much fruit. The bearing much fruit is the by-product of our union with Christ. This is so un-American. It’s so much more Eastern or something. It’s so hard for us because we are constantly trying to measure up with our accomplishments and achievements. In the kingdom of heaven, God says, “Phhh. Whatever.” Union with Christ—being united with Christ.

We’re gong to spend the next three weeks looking at the book of Exodus and the life of Moses to try to give pictures of this. This type of philosophical terminology doesn’t do much for me. I need pictures, like a little kid. So we’re going to do that.

This is a diagram that we’ve come up with to help us understand the cyclical formation of this process. Spiritual deformation. Spiritual formation. Right now you are being formed in one direction or another by what you take in through your ears, through your eyes, through your experiences. You are being formed one way or another. You are either leading to Christian spiritual formation or deformation.

All of us, before we came to Christ, were in this cycle of indulgence, which leads to idolatry, which leads to disintegration. Disintegration being our heart loves many other things, other than what it was created to love. So it doesn’t work quite right. It’s confused, restless, broken. This is the process of disintegration.

You can see this in America. Indulgence. Idolatry. Disintegration. We’re on this constant cycle. And I’m praying for election year revival. I really think we’re at this point where it’s going to turn one way or another in some ways. But there is no way that America can’t turn back. We can have our own spiritual awakening as a nation. You don’t believe it. I’m struggling too. But let’s keep praying for it.

Somewhere in that process, many of us here have been interrupted, disrupted by something outside of ourselves, even outside of creation. Something of God has broken in to our scene. The light, the love of Christ has come in. The voice of God has spoken. For some of us, there are lots of little moments of awakening that lead to this big surrender.

Remember Saul on the road to Damascus, there was this big, abrupt smack in the face. Bam. The light of God showed up and he surrendered to Christ to go into the process of spiritual formation.

For Joel, it’s funny. I know Joel. I don’t think he’s in here anymore. He’s my cousin, so I grew up with him. He describes his conversion to Christ, or his moment of awakening as a moment of surrender. He had lots of moments of awakening, where God was coming and calling to him, drawing him and calling to him. But he was like, “That’s not fun. That’s not cool. I want to go this way.” And he just kept going fake id to fake id to fake id. That’s kind of what he was doing. But his big moment of truth was when he took his fake id and tore it up. He was like, “Okay, God. I’m going to go your way.” And he started following Christ and going through the process.

Surrender is a big part of that awakening. But that moment of awakening leads to this formation of purgation and illumination, which ultimately leads to union. We’ll describe more of that as we go on. You tracking with me? You want to sign this contract? I’m trying to sell you something right now.

Spiritual practices. So people who have been paying attention to all these years of church history, paying attention to what the Bible teaches, paying attention their own lives and have written and discovered there are certain things: spiritual disciplines, spiritual practices. There are certain things that we can do as believers that will helps us progress down the road of spiritual formation.

These are not “rub the genie get what you want.” There is no guarantee you are going to do one of these things and—aha!—you get what you want. God doesn’t work like that. But there are practices that have been proven to be helpful. What’s interesting is that you might find some of these things are helpful for you and some are not. Whereas for your spouse, maybe some of them are helpful for her and some are not. So you’ve got to try to find what are the spiritual practices in your own life with your personality, with your job, with your family, with your illness or whatever it might be—what are some spiritual practices that will help you.

What we’re going to do as a church is to dive into this and begin to discover these things. In the month of January, we’re going to practice some of these things specifically. Our hope is that maybe you’ll grab a couple of these and find out, “Wow. When I do these things, I seem to progress. I seem to strengthen. I seem to hear God’s voice a little better, a little clearer.”

So then, when you go through the seasons of your life, where maybe your marriage is struggling, or one of your kids is totally crazy, or you’re having a hard time or dark night of the soul, or something happens—you’ll have a couple of these practices that you can run to and say, “God I’m going do this. Meet me here again.” It’s helpful in those times to have those. Journaling is a huge part of my walk with Christ. It’s so embarrassing because I sound like a girl. I’m writing in my diary all the time. But it’s true. I’m not a girl, but I journal all the time.

Spiritual practices that can help. We’re going to visit some quick examples. We’ll fill these lists out. The last life or slow life. We need to cultivate this. This is abstaining from food, from television, from social media, from music in your car, whatever it might be for seasons of your life so you can draw closer to the Lord.

The grounded life or grow. Start a Bible reading program. Memorize scripture. Read a Christian book about spiritual formation. Schedule appointments with a spiritual mentor or Christian therapist, something like that so that you can grow.

The giving, generous life. Serve someone in need. Give gifts to people in need. Share your faith. Or just take your family and move to Manfredonia for a year. Ways to say, “I’m going to just give out, and in doing that, I’m going to hope the Lord will respond with drawing us closer, filling our tank.” That’s what Joel’s been able to share, even though they’re going through tough times.

So those are practices for January specifically. I’m a pastor. I might be your pastor. You can call me whatever you want. You can call me “That guy up there.” But I’m asking you, summoning all the authority I can in saying, “Please participate with us on this:”

In January, we want you to join us on Sundays. You’re already doing great. Great job everybody. And in your Life Groups. If you don’t have a Life Group, we’ll be launching some more in February, so hold up for that.

Then, on Wednesdays, we want you to fast from food: breakfast and lunch and snacks. Then join us at 7:00 pm for a full on prayer meeting, where you’re going to pray out loud in front of other people. We’re going to pray. It’s not going to be church like this. It’s going to be a prayer service. We are going to provide soup at 6:00 for anyone who needs to eat before they pray, because they’re too angry to pray. And for families and all of that. It just work out conveniently so we could have a little fellowship, too. But the main thing is, no food on Wednesdays. Three Wednesdays, that’s all we’re asking for. Then at 7:00 we’re all going to pray together in here, super hungry or soupy, whatever it might be. We’re going to pray and seek the Lord for 2020 and for each other and all of that. You ready? Are you with that?

The last thing is we want everyone to commit to one thing in each of those categories for twenty-one days. It’s just twenty-one days starting next Sunday. We gave you a little handout. So you can choose one of these, or you can write something in if you have better ideas than us. We’re totally comfortable with that..

Serve (choose one)

Spend time with someone in need
Serve someone in need
Give gifts to people in need
Share your faith
______________________

But for twenty-one days we want to try to set ourselves differently, as we’re going into this year with the hope that God will speak, God will guide, God will fill our tanks so that we can go through 2020 in all of that. We’re probably going to need to reset a couple of times throughout the year. But we want to start out that way, as well.

So, can you please join us, even though you’re like, “Well, you know, I’m really busy.” That’s fine. But just maybe for three Wednesdays, can you join us? I mean, our house is supposed to be a house of prayer. That’s what Jesus taught us. To some extent, I think, we’re going to be measured more on our prayer time attendance than we are in anything else, of whether we’re doing a good job. It’s important for us to gather together and pray together as a family.

If you were here Christmas Eve at the first service, there were a thousand people, and about a hundred of you, I’m so sorry, I know it was miserable for you. But this is fasting and prayer time, so if there’s a thousand people in here and we’re all miserable, it’s better. We’ll do whatever we’ve got to do Wednesday, January 15. That’s the first one. It’s going to be great. It’s going to be good.

Now I want to focus in really quick as we bring this message a little more to us. I want to focus on the broken heart. That’s our starting point. That’s where we’re beginning. For those of us who are honest, even if we had a great 2019, we’re still starting this year with a broken heart, a heart that we can’t quite understand, a heart that goes places we don’t want it to go, a heart that isn’t there when we need it to be there in love and strength.

We define the broken heart with a few words. It’s a fallen heart. What I mean by that is what the Bible teaches. Psalm 51:5 (NASB)

Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity,
And in sin my mother conceived me.

Before you ever did anything, the Bible teaches that your heart was fallen. It was broken. It was bent toward sin. You didn’t teach your kids how to sin, did you? If you did, that’s horrible. You didn’t teach your kids to say the word, “Mine,” did you? But they all figured it out. Mine. Mine. Mine! “Where did that come from, man? I’m going to change my bedtime stories.” You didn’t teach them. You didn’t teach them, but it’s there. They were born that way, with a broken heart.

Ecclesiastes 7:20 (NASB)

Indeed, there is not a righteous man on earth who continually does good and who never sins.

So, if you thought that was you, sorry to burst your bubble this morning. And women, you are included in there, okay? It says men, but women are in there too.

Isaiah 64:6 (NASB)

For all of us have become like one who is unclean,
And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment;

Even if we try really hard to get our act cleaned up, even if we’re trying to do good things, even for God, potentially, the truth is, they are all filthy garments. That was one of the things that God had so much trouble with the people of Israel. They were doing so many good things, but out of dirty hearts, which made it all dirty.

Then in 1 John 1:8 (NASB)

If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us.

A little bit of honesty time as we begin 2020. The truth is we have a fallen heart. We have a heart that is bent toward things away from God. All of us do. Not only do we have a fallen heart, but we have a deceitful heart. Just like 1 John says, our heart likes to deceive us and trick us.

Jeremiah 17:9-10 (MSG) goes a little bit heavier. He says:

The heart is hopelessly dark and deceitful,
a puzzle that no one can figure out.
But I, God, search the heart
and examine the mind.
I get to the heart of the human.
I get to the root of things.
I treat them as they really are,
not as they pretend to be.

Because we have this awareness of our deceitful heart, of our fallen heart, we spend all of our lives trying to dress it up. We come up with all kinds of facades, all kinds of disguises, all kinds of fronts that we project because we don’t want anyone to really know the true state of our heart. That’s true for all of us. It’s true for me.

If you guys knew the stuff that goes through my heart and my mind, you would go to another church. And I would join you somehow. But then you’d have to go to different church again. But then I would too. Maybe we would end up at the same one and then we’d have to go. But maybe you’d get lucky and you’d go somewhere where I wasn’t there. But then, if I knew stuff in your heart, then it would… See what I’m saying? Honest. Honest. Honest. This deceiful, fallen heart.

Augustine, this guy who wrote in about the 300th, 400th century after Christ, was a great Christian thinker. He’s been really formative, even today, for a lot of Christian philosophy and theology. He wrote something called the Confessions. In it, he describes the restless heart. He described his heart. At one point his heart was so restless because he didn’t know who he was, where he came from, or what he was supposed to do. You might be coming into 2020 feeling that. “I don’t really know who I am or what I’m supposed to do.” It’s an anxiety, a restlessness that stirs up within you.

He talks about another aspect of the restless heart. Once you say, “Okay, I feel like I know who I am. I know what I want. I know what I’m hoping for.” And then you get that. And it’s like, “Yes!” You know? It’s like a week of “Yes!” And then there’s like another four days of “Yes!” And there’s like, “Oh, no. The restlessness is coming again!” That ache. That restlessness begins to surface again. And you’re like, “No! The very thing I thought would answer this.” The job. The new house. The girl. Whatever it might be. It hasn’t actually hasn’t done anything. It’s kind of scratched the itch, but now it’s even stronger.

And that’s a real challenge. That’s America right there. Keep scratching the itch. Never stop scratching the itch. Instead of seeing that, maybe there’s an itch that can’t be scratched by the things in this life and in this world.

The last restlessness he talks about is the the restlessness of the Christian, in the process of spiritual formation. This restlessness comes from the fact that you know who you are. You know where you are going. But you know there are a lot of miles between here and there. And you are okay with that, and you understand that, but it’s still a restlessness because you long to be at that point where you’re with Christ, united with Christ. When our faith becomes sight and our union becomes easy. There isn’t a gravity of this world pulling us out of that union all the time, that we’re resisting. We are just united with Christ.

That’s our longing. Yet we know that we are not there. We are in this process, on the way there. But we know we can’t control when we get there. That lies in the hands of God the Father, who will send his Son at the time appointed to bring times of refreshing. So there’s this restlessness that comes from that. But that’s a restlessness that the peace of Christ satisfies. A restlessness that’s also filled with hope. And a restlessness that makes us do like the Fritzes and say, “Hey, I want to find the people who restless in those other categories and share with them the love and hope of Christ so they can move out of that into a restlessness that actually has peace mingled with it.” That’s our hope.

Lastly, the heart that is broken, fallen, deceitful and restless, it has these unwanted longings. Unwanted desires. Where we know there is infiltration coming from outside, but what is so bizarre is that, every once in a while, your own heart within you will start to want something that you know is out of line. Yet, for some reason, you can’t just stop it from wanting it. It’s because we have broken hearts.

What awakening does is it brings us to a point where we can be awake in Christ. We can receive the life of Christ. What the Bible teaches is that, when that happens, when we surrender our broken heart to God, he fixes it. And the way that he fixes it is interesting. He puts a new heart within. And this is where it’s tricky. The way the Bible describes it is it’s almost like we have both hearts now.

I heard someone say it’s like a kidney transplant. In a kidney transplant, they leave the old kidney in there and they put a new one in there. They wire it all up, but they don’t bother to take the old kidney out. It’s crazy. And that’s a little bit like what goes on with us. The Lord puts this new heart in us, but we still have the old heart. So there’s this battle going on within us. And the Bible talks about the spirit vs. the flesh. You know, when I’m talking with the kids,I’m usually like, “the good dog and the bad dog.” If you feed the good dog it gets stronger. If you feed the bad dog it gets stronger. You don’t feed the bad dog it gets weaker. You feed the good dog and it gets stronger and—hey—you’re doing better.

It’s a little bit of what spiritual formation is and spiritual practices. It’s trying to form and grow and strengthen the spirit within us—that new heart that God has given us, so that you can become strong, healthy and vibrant. That’s what spiritual formation is all about. That’s what we’re going to be participating in. That’s what you have to figure out on your own, but we’re collectively going to try to figure it out together, so that you can figure out on your own. But we all start with this broken heart.

I love this. I just want to wrap up with this. This is so comforting to me, when I think through the challenge of all of these things. There are two things I want to read to you as we wrap up. The first is something from a lady named Celia Corey, who’s writing about St. John of the Cross and Theresa of Avila. Some of you are going to love this and some of you are going to be like, “I never want to hear that again.” Because it’s very wordy.

A major conceptual dynamic in all religious traditions is the need for purification and transformation of an individual in order to affect integration and maturation of the personality in the divine.

It’s just fancy ways of saying what we just said.

Although the means by which this purification takes place differs according to cultural and religious configurations of any given tradition, nevertheless a reoccurring image of that of an inner and outer odyssey is necessary. A major example is the threefold path of John of the cross…

Which is what we have: purgation, illumination and union.

…which represents a psycho spiritual journey by which divine osmosis can be realized, passing through the dark night of the soul and culminating in spiritual marriage. Although not accepted by many theoreticians or practitioners of mysticism, nevertheless the value of the San Juan schemata still holds sway in contemporary society.

Do you guys feel better? Let me say a lot of that in a scripture way. This is 2 Corinthians 3:16-18 :

But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. [between them and God] Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

The way Paul was writing, that someone later tried to sum up in a kind of psychological way, is the process of how we are formed, it isn’t about human effort. It’s not about all these challenges. It’s not about getting things right here and there. It’s simply about contemplating the face of Jesus. It’s trying to find a way to quiet the noise around us. To quiet our minds within us. You know, the world is full of noise, with our phones dinging, with the tv on, with the stuff on the radio, with other people. There is constant noise. It’s neither good nor bad. I’m not making a judgment on that. It’s just so full of noise. We’ve got to find times of quiet to hear the still, small voice of God.

Not only that, but our own minds. We in America have really started to believe that we can work as hard as we want for as long as we want and then just shut it off and sleep any time we want. And when that doesn’t work for us, we still work just as hard and just as long and then we take a little medicine or a little wine to try to quiet our minds to sleep. And that might work for a little while, but once that stops working, we never go back to the amount of work and the way that we’re using our minds in a way that is beyond what it was supposed to be meant for. Trying to ever scratch the itch and gain more wealth and position and whatever. We run right through Sabbath—whatever it might be. And we can’t figure out why our mind won’t shut off when we need it to shut off. Because we’ve spun it out of control.

So we not only have to quiet the world around us, but we need to figure out how to quiet our own minds, to find a rhythm and a pace of life that changes depending on how old or young you might be, so that our minds can actually be healthy enough to once again rest and hear the still, small voice of the Lord.

And then our hearts are crazy, too. But we have to find a way to kind of get into a place where we can actually sit and contemplate the face of Jesus. Jesus did the work to remove the veil. He died on a cross. He paid the price for our sins so that the veil between us and God could be torn forevermore. So now there is nothing that separates us from the very presence and freedom and light and beauty of Christ’s presence. Yet, for some reason, when we get there our minds are so spun out, our worlds are so busy that we still can’t really receive what he has for us.

So the first step is to acknowledge our broken heart and to acknowledge the busyness around us, and to realize that the whole goal of Christian formation is to be more like Christ. The only way we’re going to be more like Christ is if we can spend time contemplating the face of Christ.

So that’s what we’re going for. That’s a good starting point. And then, as always, as Jude taught us, remember that it’s the work of God to make us spotless and full of joy before his presence. So don’t feel some sort of legalistic burden laid on you right now. Feel the hope that, if you’ll find time to carve out time to contemplate the face of Jesus—he’s torn the veil through his blood and sacrifice on the cross. He’s the one that’s taken on the responsibility to make sure when you show up he’s got guidance for you. All you’ve got to do is figure out how to show up, and not show up so burned out, fried, busy and loud, but you can actually receive his still, small voice. That’s what we’re going for.

Let’s pray right now. This is a good place. The space between heaven and earth feels a little thin in here most of the time. I hope you feel that. Let’s just bow our heads and quiet our hearts.

God, I ask that you would help quiet our minds—even us that our minds spin and run and have a hard time being still. I pray that, by your Spirit, by the power of your Spirit, Lord, you would bring a holy silence, a holy stillness in this place. We just want you, Jesus.

And in this place, really, I just want you to think about your heart and if any of those descriptions of the broken heart really resonated, if you’re being honest. If you’re able, if you’re willing, just in a whisper you can say, “God, I want to give you my heart. As we start this year of 2020, and you’ve still got breath in my lungs, I just want to give you my broken heart, that you might begin to form it in a way that you see fit.”

I think about my kids. When something they care about breaks, they don’t try to fix it. They run to me and they put it in my hands. I think this is a good moment to run to your Father in heaven and put your heart in his hand, because he’ll take it and he really knows how to fix it. He’s the one who made it in the first place.

Lord, we do give you our hearts this morning. We pray that you would take and form them. Transform them, Lord. Help us learn how to quiet ourselves before you in a very loud world. I pray all this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Unless otherwise noted, Scripture is taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.

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