We've been talking about the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and this morning we are gonna look at some scriptures that, at least for me, are hard. All for the last few weeks, I've been reading quite a lot, Matthew 9, 10 and 11. And I keep reading it and rereading it, and I almost feel like we should do a verse-by-verse Bible study, because there are hard things that Jesus said in those chapters.

The title of our message today is Doing the stuff. Doing the stuff. Do you all know where that came from? Anybody, anybody? One of my heroes of the faith, a contemporary hero of the faith is John Wimber. Some of you may have heard of him, some of you may not. He was the founder of the Vineyard Church, and he was someone who, for years, moved in powerful demonstrations of miracles and healing in a way different from the faith healers of the fifties and sixties.

I realized this morning, a month ago, Cheryl and I shared about the, the, the young and the old together, and here we are this morning, taking a step into the very essence of that message with Steven on the platform. As I said, this is, I don't know, sometime in July, he sent me a long text and it was a message that the Lord had dropped in his heart. Cheryl and I read it, and we thought, wow, that's pretty amazing. We started talking, I said, and right away a scripture came to mind in the gospel, I thought, this is a Jesus way.

Pastor Jeff: I better get the box of Kleenex. This isn't a tearful word. I'm hoping this'll be-- well, I really believe this is a prophetic message more so than maybe some of the others we've had. Give credit where credit is due. Cheryl is the one who was inspired with this. It started with something that she said that she believed that Hope needed to hear. We are going to just dive right in, in the interest of time. I can't quite see the clock. I got one right here. Okay. Just don't want to hold you too long. It's been a busy morning already. But, uh, we want to wrap it up. The name of this message is the Jesus Way, because that's what we've been teaching: the Jesus Way. This one is the New and the Old together. And we are going to start out with Matthew chapter 13, verse 52. This is in the Passion Translation.

God has a vision for a church. He has dreams and he has plans that he wants to fulfill. He does it through the people that he brings to the church. Every single one of us, it's good for us to understand that the Lord brought you to Hope because you had something that you could offer that would help fulfill his vision for hope. Every one of you. You may or may not know what that is, but you belong here because Jesus put you here to accomplish something.

So how do you like that? Jesus gave his disciples, we happen to be some of those disciples, he gave them authority over all of the power of the enemy. That's you and that's me. Jesus gave us authority over all the power of the enemy. There is no power that Satan or his demonic accord has that you don't have more of. In fact, we will get into it probably the next time we speak what kind of power he has and it's very limited. But regardless of that, every one of us, every single one of us who is a child of God, has been given this authority.

We've been teaching the Jesus ways over the last year and this morning I felt like the Lord kind of steered me tohis words in Matthew 5, where he talks about us being salt and he talks about us being light. We are going to talk about the Jesus way of being salt and the Jesus way of being light in this world.

Of course, Cheryl and I have been teaching about the Jesus way different, different Jesus ways since last summer. This morning we are going to talk about the whole concept that he taught us that the greatest among you shall be your servant. As Cheryl and I have been stewing in, in this concept and conversing over the last month, it keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

We started a month ago talking about one of the Jesus ways and we read several scriptures where he talked about how the greatest among you shall be your servant. A month ago when we shared this back in March, I really realized as Cheryl and I were spending time on this, that this was as much about identity, our identity as it was about anything and how important it is for us to recognize who we are and to be able to realize how great we are in order to be the servants that Jesus called us to be. And of course, he was really addressing, on many levels, but on one level, he was saying, if you think you are great, prove it by how well you serve. Because if you think you are great and you are not serving, you are not really great at all.

There are ways of Jesus that are completely different than what our culture thrives on. So often in the church, we take all of these cultural ways and try to do the kingdom work the way that the culture does its work, and the two are diametrically opposed to each other. I'm excited to kind of start to really help us to go deeper from where Jeff has been digging and is digging. It's going to be a good year. It's going to be a good year to just discover more of the ways of Jesus while we are on the way with him. Hallelujah.

We were talking about the way of Jesus that is childlikeness. We were talking about what it means to be like a child and how, and what that means to our relationship with the father. One of the things that we said about that is that one thing that children do easily is they trust, they believe easily. That just really came alive to me. I'm going to share a little bit later in, in the message how I got inspired even to talk about this. But it really came alive to me. And so Cheryl and I have been kicking around this whole concept of childlike faith for a number of weeks now, and ticking it back and forth and talking a lot about it. I really think that it's, it's just worth spending a morning on.

Today, we are going to talk about another Jesus way, and that is child likeness. We are going to talk about being like children. Most of the world has lost that. Most of the adult world has lost that much of the child world has lost that much to my dismay. Too many children are being asked to grow up way too soon and grapple with issues that they should not have to grapple with when they are 10 years old. But such as our world. But Jesus has something better for us. We are going to look at the Jesus way of child likeness this morning.

I don't want this message to confuse you or to bring you into a place of guilt. That's really not the point. And yet the whole concept of loving your enemies is a real thing. And so hopefully we can, we can just see how Jesus did it, we can see who Jesus did it with and we can start, ourselves, to try to practice this.

Today we are going to talk about generosity. Generosity is a Jesus way, but it doesn't begin with money. Generosity begins in the heart and it's formed in us as his love heals us. What he does over time is he creates in us a generous spirit. That's really what we are going to talk about today. We won't be talking about giving money. We'll be talking about giving ourselves and we'll be talking about giving to others. Nobody ever left the presence of Jesus that they weren't a better person for having been with him. Always, he invested something in them and they left with more than they came. It wasn't just healing. It was a sense of self-worth. It was a sense of value. It was a sense of being loved, and he wants us to carry that with him.

Prayer is one of those things we've been inoculated against in the church. We've all heard enough about it. So, let's wake up to what prayer really is because, for the most part, our understanding of prayer is a little bit short of what the Lord intends for it to be anyways. The beginning of a new understanding happened to me a long time ago.

We want to start a theme and we are calling it the Jesus Way. What we are going to do is every time that we share, we want to share about one of the ways that Jesus has ordained us to live that results in blessing in our life, because we are living right now in a culture where everything is being turned upside down. There are all kinds of options that are being laid before you and your children and your grandchildren about choices you can make about life. Every one of those options is going to end up with a result.

This morning's message is on the ministry of healing. I've said it before, but just to say it again, the reason that we even embarked on this is because I think many of us understand that there seems to be a clear sign that the father is bringing his church into a season of answered prayer. Not just Hope, but his church. It includes Hope. And so I just felt like it's really a great time to talk about prayer and to talk about the ministry of prayer and to talk about the ministry of healing, because we all want to be inspired. We want our faith to be enlarged, and we want to begin to pray more. Because if we are in a season of answered prayer, then clearly the more we pray, the more answers we are going to see. And so we want to be inspired to pray. We want to see faith rise up in us to pray.

Everything that Jesus did, we are going to see, was intended to bring health, wholeness, and wellbeing to us. That is what redemption is for on this earth. We don't have to wait for heaven for that. Jesus brought his kingdom here so that we could experience the benefits of his kingdom here and now in this life.

Part one, ministry part one, today, we are going to talk about hearing God's voice. You might say, what does hearing God's voice have to do with healing? Actually everything, because the ministry of healing is a ministry of partnership. There are three people involved in the ministry of healing or more, but three specific components. There's you as the prayer, the person who's praying for healing, there is the person you are praying for, they are a partner in that process and there is the holy spirit.

We are going to talk about worship. That's not an unheard-of topic. And for many of us who have, uh, spent much of our lives in the charismatic culture of worship, a lot of this is not new. The Lord just awakened some new thoughts about the value of corporate worship. We are in a season where a lot of a lot of the church has exited the church. They haven't stopped loving Jesus, but they are done with church. In fact, there is a name for those kinds of people. It's called the doners: done with church, but now with Jesus.