Life.Church with Craig Groeschel - Habits, Part 3: Stopping

Episode Date: January 20, 2019

Change isn’t easy, but it isn’t impossible, either. Your future self is a result of the decisions you make each day. Starting a few small Habits can change how you see yourself today and transform you into the person you want to be tomorrow. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey, thanks for joining us here at Life Church, where we are one church meeting in multiple locations and reaching around the world thanks to what God is doing at Church online. If you ever have any questions, or you want to learn more about us as a church, you can always check us out online simply by going to life. church. We'd love for you to stay connected throughout your weekend, everywhere you go with the Life Church app. It's free and available wherever you download your apps from. With that said, let's go to this week's message. It brings me great joy to tell you that last weekend we had 1,200 people.

signed up to be baptized. What's way more incredible to me is we baptized over 1,500 people last week. Can you imagine this? We have 300 or so people that were so moved that they just went spontaneously. He said, I want to publicly stand up and proclaim the Lordship of Jesus Christ in my life. So congratulations to all of you. I hope you feel it. I hope you feel the move of what God is doing here.

I always say we're not praying for revival. We're living in the middle of one, in special times. If you're new with us, we are in a message series that we're calling habits. I recommended several books that impacted my life in a significant way. One of them is called Atomic Habits by the author James Clear. I enjoyed his work so much that I'll be interviewing him for my leadership podcast. One of the thoughts I really like that James said is that almost everybody has similar goals. I never thought of that before.

If I sat down with 100 of you and ask you, what do you want to do? what do you want to accomplish? Most of you would say some form of the same thing. You want to be in good health. You want to have great relationships. If you're a Christian, you want to be close to God. You want to make a difference in this world. You want to be financially strong.

You want to be generous. I don't know anybody who would state a negative goal. I don't know anybody who would say, my lifetime goal is to always struggle financially and live paycheck to paycheck. And every time my spouse buys something, I'll say, you bought what? I don't know anybody who would say that.

I can't imagine somebody saying I hope to gain five pounds every year over the next 20 years so that I can struggle in the later half of my life with my weight and health. Can't imagine anybody doing that. I can't visualize somebody saying I have a five-year goal to become a raging addict. If I can just become addicted to something, I could potentially wreck my marriage, I could hurt my children, I could lose relationships with all the people that I love, It wouldn't be amazing for me to become addicted to something. Nobody does that.

Let's not be so dramatic. Let's just kind of tone it down a bit. I don't know anybody who says, I want to just work for years and years at a dead-end job, something I don't care about at all. I want to live a passionless life. I want to get toward the end of my life and say, I didn't really accomplish anything, but one thing I do have is regrets. I don't know anybody who wants to end up like that.

What's so crazy interesting to me when I think about it is there's almost nobody that ruins their life because of one really bad decision. Maybe a few, but the vast majority of people don't ruin their lives because of one really stupid decision. The vast majority of people ruin their lives, one small decision, one bad step, one bad habit, one day at a time. over a series of years, they end up in a really bad place. They will summarize a lifetime of bad decisions in one sentence. Have you ever noticed this? Someone will summarize a whole decade of bad decisions. They'll say like, well, yeah, she fell into sin and she cheated on her husband,

and they ended up divorce. One sentence summary, but all sorts of steps that led to that bad place. Yeah, he always struggled with his weight. He died at the age of 58, and they summarized it with one sentence. Yeah, he was really irresponsible, and so eventually the company fired him. But he didn't get fired because of one bad decision. It was a series.

They'll summarize a season of bad decisions with one sentence, but it's rarely ever just one event. I like to read in the Bible those summary statements, and they're all over. If you read with eyes to see the one sentence summaries, you'll see them everywhere. To me, one of the most profound ones is found in Judges, chapter 16, verse one.

And it summarizes what became a serious, of bad decisions for Samson. If there was any guy that was born with incredible potential given to him by God, it was Samson. And yet, because of one bad decision, one step, one bad habit, one day at a time, he ended up in a life that completely fell apart. Judge 16-1 is a summary sentence that says one day, everybody say one day? One day, Samson went to Gaza where he saw a prostitute.

One sentence summarizes the beginning. of the trajectory downward for the life of this guy that was incredibly gifted by God. One day, Samson went down to Gaza where he saw a prostitute. You likely don't know geography. I had to look it up, but Gaza is 25 miles from Samson's hometown, Zora. Gaza was the Philistine headquarter

where Samson was public enemy number one. In order to go into Gaza was to put his life at risk. What we know about the time when Samson lived is there was no Uber. So we could assume that perhaps one option was Samson might have walked 25 miles into enemy territory to see a prostitute. Question. How many people walk 25 miles into a place that could kill you all to get a little squeeze? Maybe I shouldn't have said squeeze. Maybe I should have said boogabunga, maybe a little hubba.

I don't know what you want me to say, but to get a little whatever you want to call it. Who does that? The answer is, people do it every single day. Since I only work on Sundays and I have nothing to do during the week, I decided to research and ask myself, how long does it take to go 25 miles? How many steps do you have to take? So I researched it. Do you know how many steps it takes to go 25 miles?

Approximately 56,250 steps. I would submit to you that Samson didn't ruin his life all at one time. But yet in that instance, he took 56,250 steps in a direction that would begin a life of spiraling downward and out of control. Most of us don't wreck our lives all at once. How do we do it? We do it. One bad decision. One wrong step.

One bad habit one day at a time. And that's why we're talking about our habits. If you were with us in the first week, we started with a few. the idea of who before do. Before we talk about the habits that we want to do, let's talk about who we want to become. Who do you want to be? Who does God want you to be? A godly father, a godly wife. A great example to the students that you go to school with. A person who's healthy, a person who's generous, someone who's sober, someone who's clean. Who do you want to be? The second week we answer the question, based on who you want to become, what one habit do you need to start?

Start with the who, then what one habit do you need to start to become who you want to be? Today we're going to add one more small layer to it, and that is this. Here's the question and the point of application. Based on who you want to become, what one habit do you need to break? what one habit is unhealthy, maybe unhelpful, perhaps ungodly, that's taking you in a direction that ultimately you do not want to go. What one habit, based on who do you want to become, do you need to break? I like what James said about the filthy habits in James 121.

He said, get rid of them all. Get rid of every filthy habit and all wicked conduct. You're not going to do it on your own. What are you going to do? You're going to submit yourself to God. and accept the word that he plants in your hearts, which is able to save you. What one habit do you need to ridge yourself of to become who God wants you to become? We're going to talk about how to do that today.

Before we talk about how, let's talk about what. What is the one habit that you need to break? We need to acknowledge it. We need to define it. You cannot defeat what you cannot define. What is the one for you? We're not talking about some of you might say, well, I've got about 27 I need to break.

Don't say 27. If you try to do 27, you'll do zero. We're going to talk about one. What's your one? You may have a problem with a bad attitude, a complaining heart, maybe a gossiping tongue. I know for you it's not gossip. You're just telling people so they can pray about it. Maybe you've got a gossiping tongue.

Okay, what is it that you want to break? It could be an eating issue. Maybe you eat and vomit. Maybe you eat too much. Maybe you eat too much sugar. Maybe you eat too much chocolate. Maybe you eat too many snacks. Maybe it's an eating issue.

It could be technology addiction. Maybe you're addicted to video games. It's kind of fun in games at first, but now it's taken over your life and it's hurting your relationships and it's a little bit out of control. Maybe it's social media. Scroll, scroll, click, scroll, click, scroll, click, like, scroll, scroll, click, like, scroll, clothes on and on. Maybe it's binge watching too much Netflix. Maybe it's pornography. You've tried to quit. You promise you wouldn't do it again and you haven't quit. Maybe it's just your mobile device.

You know, it's like you can't be away from that thing. If you like hand it to somebody, you get severe anxiety. Because it's a part of you and you have to check it nonstop. You're wasting your life looking at a screen. Maybe it's a substance. Maybe you're addicted to sugar. maybe to nicotine, maybe to an illegal substance, maybe prescription medication. I don't know what it is. I had a seminary, excuse me, I had a seminary professor tell me one time, he said, if more than one person who loves you tells you that you have a problem, you very likely have a problem.

May I suggest that to you today lovingly? If more than one person who cares about you tells you you got a problem with something, maybe you got a problem. The habit that I'm breaking is my screen time. It admittedly is far less than the average. I have researched it. But in my standards, it's way too much. Ever since Apple told me how much time I'm looking at my phone,

it's horrifying to me that I would waste that much time. So I have time limits on certain apps. At 10 minutes, I'm out. I can't look at that anymore. because I am not going to waste my God-given life, staring at someone else's posed image on a screen and waste the calling that I have. Based on who you want to become,

what one habit do you need to break? Let's talk for a moment about why this is difficult because that gives us insight into how to do it. Have you noticed there's a difference between why a good habit is difficult to start and a bad habit is difficult to break? For example, a good habit is challenging at first, and then the payoff, the win, is somewhere in the future, right?

Have you noticed that? For example, you're going to start jogging. And so in the morning you're going to get up and you're going to be a jogger. And the morning your alarm goes up. Oh, it's so early. And then you put your stuff out like, this is going to be great. And you go, it's not great. It's cold.

And it's hard. It's difficult. And you do this for a while and you see no payoff. And you have to do it for a consistent time. And then seven months later, you wake up, oh, my gosh, I'm down nine pounds. And I've got the beginning stages of buns of steel. It's difficult at first, and the payoff is somewhere out there in the future. You decide you're going to be plugged into God's house, the church.

You're going to be involved. It's difficult at first. I've got to get up. I got to go serve, and you don't see an initial payoff. And then a year later, you wake up and go, oh, my gosh, I had no idea I could ever be this close to God. And I've got this supernatural peace, and his word is dwelling in me, and I'm being conformed to the image of Christ, and I've got amazing friends around me. We're doing life together.

and I'm using my gifts to make a difference. It didn't happen after two weeks. It took some time. It's difficult at first, and the payoff is in the future. Bad habits, though, are the opposite, right? There is a perceived benefit immediately. It's fun to do what's wrong at first. Sin can be fun.

How many of you say, I agree? Raise your hands. Raise your hands. I'm not raising my hand in church saying sins. No, no, no, no. Sin can be fun. If you don't think it is, either you didn't do it right. or you're lying.

I don't know which. It can be fun, and then it's not that it messes you up. There's a perceived benefit, but the negative payoff isn't until the future. For example, you want to smoke a siggy. I said Siggy a couple of weeks ago, and everybody laughed. I thought you were laughing because I said Siggy. I didn't realize until afterwards several people said, when you said Ziggy, you did this.

And this isn't how you smoke a sick. So for all the SIGI police that are critiquing my SIGI style, if you smoke a SIGI, just making sure I get it right. I don't know this stuff. I never ever smoked a SIGI. And I'm not entirely sure if I smoked anything else because I was too drunk to remember, but some say I might have. I don't know.

So where was I? He got me up on this. I don't know. That was before I was a Christian in case you're one. It was not last Tuesday. So, hey, I'm just so you'll know. So, they help me. Where was that, Pastor Chris?

Perceived benefit. Like, I don't know what, like, this feels good. This makes me relaxed, okay? And the cost isn't until years later when they tell you bad news about your lungs. You're the customer of the year at the all you can eat buffet. You love the little banana pudding with the wafers in it. You eat it all, you know, it's all so good for a while. And it's decades later you find out you got type two.

diabetes. There's a perceived benefit for a little while, and a negative payoff isn't until later. Understanding that helps us to know how we break a bad habit. If a good habit's difficult to do at first, what do we do? Last way we talked about, make it easy and make it obvious. If on the other hand, the bad habit looks appealing in the short hunt, what we're going to do, on the other hand, is we're going to make it difficult to do. We're going to make it really, really hard to do the bad habit because we only have so much willpower. Just like your ability to make decisions,

wanes as you make decisions, just like your energy depletes as you exert energy. So does your willpower, and you know it because you can fight certain things off for a while, and then you get tired of fighting it off. I don't know what it might be for you. Maybe you're trying to eat good, and they bring your favorite donuts into the office.

The first time you walk by them with confidence, power, and victory in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, I can do all things too. I don't need those stupid donut. They don't even look good. Who eats those donuts? Only losers eat those donuts. The second time you walk by and you look at them and you say, hmm, I praise God for what I'm not even going to eat there.

I don't even need that. The third time you walk by it, you touch them. Just to see, what does this feel like? I thank you, God. This has no power. Then one day you smell it. Just a, hmm, I don't need this. Then you eat a half of one.

And you wait seven minutes before you eat the second half. because somehow you tell yourself it's not a hole if you have seven minutes in between. Then once you lose your donut virginity, you eat four because I already ain't once. I might as well eat more. You know what I'm talking about? Am I the only person that has a hard time walking by the donuts sometimes? What we're going to do is we're going to make it difficult to do. I love the way Solomon phrased it in Proverbs chapter 4, verse 14, about anything that's tempting, anything that's evil.

He says, don't set foot on the past. to the donuts, who don't set a foot on the path of the wicked, or walk in the way of evil-doers. Then he says this, he says, avoid it, don't travel on it, turn from it, go your own way. If you didn't hear me the first time, I'm going to tell you four different times, four different ways, you make it difficult to get around that which could harm you.

We're going to make it difficult to do. If you're with us last week, we talked about the habit loop. Let me show it to you again. Research shows again and again that every bad habit starts with a cue or a trigger, something that says, oh, this is what you want to do. That leads to an action that's followed by the reward, the high, the buzz, the dopamine hit, the fun, the pleasure, the whatever it is, and then it goes trigger, action, reward, and such. How do we break the habit?

What we're going to try to do is we're going to try to remove the trigger and interrupt the action. whatever it is that triggers us in the wrong direction, we're going to try to remove that trigger and we're going to try to interrupt the action. Let's talk for a moment about triggers. We can be triggered into a bad habit or an unhelpful action by all sorts of different things, but studies show there are five major triggers

that generally will lead us in the wrong direction. What are they? You know this because you can be triggered by a place you can be triggered by a time, you might be triggered by a certain mood, you're triggered by a moment, or you might be triggered by people. Place, time, mood, moment, or people.

Let's talk about place and time together. There's probably a place where you do the wrong, bad habit, and you consistently do it at a similar place. You probably don't do that habit at certain places, as well. For example, you probably don't overeat when you go to the gym. You probably don't smoke pot when you come to church. If you do, let's just have a little talk about your spiritual development. We'll find another way to approach worship in the house of God. You probably don't do those things at those places, but you might smoke pot and overheat eat at a Super Bowl party if you're with the

wrong people. It's the place. There's also a time. You probably don't binge watch pornography when you're with other people at life group. You don't do it in that time when my you do it. Maybe late at night when you're mad at your spouse or when you're a little bit feeling lonely or when you feel bored. There's probably a time and a place where you do this. Time and place really matter a lot. We're going to make sure if there's a time, there's a place that triggers us. We're going to try to remove that trigger. David in the Old Testament made a horrible mistake and you can summarize it. Wrong place, wrong time. The guy wasn't a bad guy. He genuinely loved God. You're not a bad person if you continue to fall into the same ruts.

You can genuinely love God, but if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, you might find yourself doing something you never wanted to do. If you read the story, you don't know it, David, the king who loved God, committed adultery with Bashiba, and ended up having her husband murdered. Why? Wrong place, wrong time. The beginning of the story says, in the springtime, when kings go off to war, David stayed back at the palace. When he wasn't where he wasn't supposed to be, he ended up at the wrong time going up on the rooftop,

which happened to be his neighbor's bath time, and so he started checking it out. Wrong place, wrong time. Let him to see something he shouldn't have seen, which led him to do something that he shouldn't have done, which ended up costing him more than he ever wanted to pay. Wrong place, wrong place, wrong time. If there's that consistent place, that consistent time

where you find yourself vulnerable, we're going to try to remove the triggers from our lives. There's also moods. You know it. You're more vulnerable when you're in a certain mood. experts will teach you to halt H-A-L-T If you see a mood coming

that you know you're vulnerable, you halt. What does halt stand for? When are we vulnerable? We're vulnerable when we're hungry, H. We're vulnerable when we're angry. Amy says those are not two for me. I just get hungry. If I get hungry, I get irritable, and I'm vulnerable.

L stands for lonely or when you're bored. When you find nothing going on, you feel under challenge, you feel lonely, you're vulnerable, or when you're tired. You have less strength when you're tired, and so you might halt. Oh, I'm in that place, I'm in that time, I'm in that mood where I'm more vulnerable.

I need to remove the trigger and go do something else to get myself out of danger. There's moments. There's certain moments when something happens, after that moment you end up doing the very thing that you didn't want to do. Something happens, a moment triggers you. You get in a fight with your husband,

and you call the same three girlfriends, and you have a husband bashing party because that's what you do after a fight with your husband. Or you go to the game with all the guys and you drink too much. You did it last time. You did it the time before. You did it this time.

You'll do it the next time. It's a moment that triggers you to do something wrong. You pass your test in school and so you smoke pot to celebrate. Or you flunk your test in school, so you smoke pot to console yourself. Or you skip your test in school and you smoke pot. You have a pot problem no matter what it is, okay?

You want to look for the moment that might trigger you. and we're going to distance ourselves from the time, the place, the mood, the moment, and also, this is going to hurt your feeling, but it's so important, the people. The wrong people can be triggers that lead us in the wrong direction, just as the right people can be triggers to lead us in the right direction. In fact, studies are conclusive that the closer you are to someone, the more likely you are to have the same habits as the people close to you.

There was one study I found fascinating that they tracked 12,000 people over a 32-year period. Three decades, 12,000 people. They found out all sorts of crazy interesting stuff. Two of the points are interesting to me. If you have one friend who is significantly overweight, there's a 57% more likely chance that you'll be overweight as well. One friend. On the other side, the good news is if you have one friend that looks at you have one friend that loses a significant amount of weight, one of the three closest friends to that person will

also lose a significant amount of weight. The people we hang with often shape the habits that we have. It doesn't take a study to prove this long before there are any studies. Solomon said this in Proverbs 1320. He said, if you walk with the wise, you become wise. But a companion of fools suffers harm. We become like the people that we run around with. If I can tell you about my closest friends, they're an absolute and complete gift to me. You look at my five closest friends and what you're going to find is they all love Jesus. They're all significantly evolved in the church. They're all professionals that are succeeding in some area of their life. They actually all eat very disciplined. They all work out. They all live beneath their means financially and they're all

incredibly generous. They all have good families and godly children. Think about how much easier it is me to live a life that honors God, seeing these kind of habits and disciplines around me. Think about the flip side. If my five closest friends, and I do have some friends that would fall into this category, but they are not the people I spend the most time with and have supporting me in prayer. Imagine if my five closest friends were all unemployed, all addicted to video games, all had other addiction problems in their life, and every Friday night invited me to go to the casinos where we could smoke siggies or whatever kind of siggy you want.

How much more difficult it would be for me to live a God-honoring life if that was the consistent input in my life. That's why I always say it's almost impossible to live the right life when you have the wrong friends. It doesn't mean that we're not alike to people. It doesn't mean we're not friends with all sorts of people. But Paul said it very, very clearly and kid yourself not. He said this bad company corrupts good character. Do not be misled. you become like the people that you're around.

If you're consistently going in the wrong direction and the people around you're going in the wrong direction, maybe we need to redefine our relationships and who we spend the time with. What are we going to do? We're looking at the triggers. We're going to remove the triggers and we're going to interrupt the actions.

How might this play out? Let's just get really practical. Some of you all I've heard are you're not going to hit this news button anymore. You normally hit it seven times because that's a godly number. And so you spend an extra hour and five minutes in bed before you get up in the morning. Okay? What you're going to do is you're going to recognize this day is a gift from God.

He's going to wake us up. We're going to attack it with joy and power and victory. We're going to make a difference in this way. So in order to make it more difficult to hit the snooze, make it difficult, you're going to take your clock or your mobile device and you're going to put it all the way across the room. So when it goes, ah, eh, eh, ah. If you want to hit snooze, you've got to get out of your warm, snuggly bed, walk across your cold house, hit snooze, and walk back in the bed. Just made it more difficult to do, you're more likely to do it.

We're removing the trigger. We're making it more difficult to do. If you have a problem on Amazon, click, click, click, click, click, click. Click, click. How'd I just spend $112? I don't know. Click, click. What you might do is you might have a friend, have your password, and you can't buy anything

until you go through that friend, you just made it way more difficult to do. Let's say you continue to look at lustful images, and you can't stop. What we're going to do is we're going to make it way more difficult to do. You're going to get someone else to have the pass codes to your phone, and they're going to limit adult contact, content. They may block Safari completely.

You may not be allowed to have Instagram. You're going to make it very difficult to get, you may not be able to download apps. If you're smart enough to get around all of their limitations, then you may just go to a dumb phone because your purity matters so much to you. You're not going to let images take you out of serving God faithfully and having true intimacy with someone else

because you continue to lust after something that is not real. You're going to remove the trigger and you're going to cut and break the action. How do you break a bad habit? You make it difficult to do. Then we're going to go find something. else to do, we're going to create good habits in the places of the other ones. If I can talk to some of you right now that you're deep into a habit, maybe gambling, maybe some sort of addiction

to alcohol or drugs or prescription medicine or some kind of sexual addiction for you, it's time for rehab. It's time for rehab. It's time to own up to it and say, I'm not going to let something control my life. When you look at the direction you're going, if that's not the direction you want to go, you're going to do something significant to stop it. Think about this. The habits that you have today will shape who you become tomorrow. Let that sink in. The habits you have today, they're shaping who you become tomorrow. Do you like the direction your habits are taking you? If you're not sure, just play them forward. Take that bad thing, that little secret thing, the thing you don't tell anybody or that thing that's kind of annoying, whatever it is.

For some of you, if you play that forward, five, ten, 15, 20 years, here's what you've, will say in the future, you will say, I had no idea how much this was going to cost me. I never knew I would lose so much. I would give anything if I could go back in time and do something different. I never expected to lose my family, lose my house, It was my name. Didn't do it all at once. One small, bad habit over time. Based on who you want to become, what habit are you going to break?

But I feel so weak. Because when you are weak, listen to me, Christ's strength is made perfect. Scripture says this. You're never tempted in any way that's uncommon. our God is faithful. Our God is faithful. He will never let you be tempted beyond what you can bear.

He will always give you a way out. There's always a way out. Think about Samson. 56,250 steps in the wrong direction. It was also 56,250 opportunities to stop. to turn around to say this isn't who I want to become this isn't the life that I want

God created me for something more oh but I'm not going to snooze on my arm I'm not going to eat donuts what's the big deal about that do not despise Zechariah says the day of small beginnings for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin never underestimate how God can start something special through something small.

I've talked about that verse maybe 50 times. That never hit me until this week. Do not despise the small beginnings, for the Lord does what. Say it with me, the Lord does what? The Lord rejoices. Imagine this. Imagine this. My kid scores a goal or my kid makes his bed.

He obeys. What do I do? Where to go? I rejoice. Imagine God in heaven. Rejoicing over you when you're faithful in a small thing. Where God says, way to go. You're on the right track.

You stopped going in the wrong direction. And now you're being conform to the image of my will. Then when you start to do these small things, they're not actions. They're redefining your identity. When I'm eating right, I am a healthy follower of Jesus. I'm honoring God. The temple of the Holy Spirit, I'm honoring him.

When I'm exercising, I'm an athlete. It's not what I do. It's who I am. if I'm practicing the piano. I am a musician. It's my identity. When I wake up and I read my U-Version Bible out, I am becoming a man of God.

When you don't look at that lustful trash, I'm being purified by Christ. My mind is being renewed. I am a person of integrity. It becomes identity. Then one day you wake up and you realize, because Jesus dwells within me, Christ in me is stronger than the wrong desires in me.

I am a self-discipline, devil-kicking, mountain-moving, light-shining, spirit-filled, overcomer by the blood of the lamb. And if you know the verse, by the word of my testimony, my story, this is my story. I'm not what I was. I used to be there. But God saw that I was faithful in some small. things, and he trusted me with more. Who do you want to become? Based on who you want to become, what habit do you need to start? What habit do you need to stop? Do not grow weary in doing good.

Scripture says, because at the proper time, it may be in the distance, but it will get here. The proper time, you will reap an incredible harvest if you do not give up. So Father, work in the lives are the people that you love so much. All of our churches, as you reflect in prayer, I don't even want you to think about it, but you're going to ask God, you're going to seek God. If you're in a life group, you're going to talk about it in your life group, and talk about with your family. This is the habit God's calling me to break. If you'll do that, commit to it, would you lift up your hands right now? Just all of our churches, lift them up as an indication before God you're committing to this. God, I thank you that you're going to speak to people,

and in really small ways, God, that may seem even insignificant now. We're going to start, what you call it's a start, we're going to stop what you call us to stop. And every year, little by little by little by little, as we get to know you, your word, your people, the gifts you put within us, you're going to conform us to the image of your son, Jesus. God, I thank you that you're going to help us. Some are going to break generational curses, strongholds that have followed them in their family for years and years. God, I know that we will not all succeed at 100%, but if we fail one day,

God help us not fail to. Get back up. Forgive us, empower us, God, to do your will. As you're praying today at all the churches across our country and church online, we're talking about stopping. There's some of you, guess what? Today is the day for you to stop making excuses. Some of you, it's time to quit.

putting it off. If you look at your life and I ask you where you stand spiritually, some of you recognize, yeah, you kind of believe in this stuff and you kind of are around it, but you're not fully submitted to Christ. Thought about it, you considered it. Today's the day you quit making excuses. Today's day, you stop putting it off. Why?

Because when you recognize who God is and how much he loves you and what he's done for, your only reasonable response is to give him your whole life. What's our problem? Our problem is simple. We are sinful by nature. We've all sinned and fall short of God's standard. But God, in his love and mercy, he became one of us in the person of his son, Jesus, who was born without sin.

He was perfect in every way, blameless. Jesus, the innocent one, died in our place. As our substitute, God raised him from the dead so that anyone in this does include you. It doesn't matter what you've done. How dark your life is when you call on the name that is above every name, the name of Jesus. God hears your prayers, he forgives your sins. You've been putting it off. You've been making excuses.

You're here today because this is the day of your salvation at all of our churches. Those who say no more excuses, no more delay. Today by faith, I turn for my sin. I give my life to Jesus. That's my prayer. I surrender to him. Lift your hands. I now all over the place and say yes.

That's my prayer here in this section. Right back over here. Say yes. Others of you right back here toward the back. Up here close to me. Say yes. Let me just find you and acknowledge you. Lift him up over here.

here on this side, right back over there. Thank God for you, others today. Right back over here as well, my goodness gracious, somebody ought to worship a little more than this. Church online, right over here, welcome into God's family. Church online, you click below me up here in the middle section. Would you all pray with those around you? Everybody simply pray, welcoming those to the family.

Pray Heavenly Father, forgive all my sins. Change me, make me new. Jesus be the Savior. of my life, the Lord of my heart. Holy Spirit, fill me so I could follow you, live like you, show your love, do your will. My life is not my life. I surrender it to you. Thank you for new life. You have all of mine. In Jesus name I pray. Somebody ought to shout loud. Somebody I give out born into God's family. As a church, it's our honor to play a small part in all that God is doing in and through your

life. And we would love to continue with you on that journey. To find out what your next steps could be in your relationship with Christ, all you have to do is go to life.church slash next. You know, here at Life Church, it's our mission to lead people to become fully devoted followers of Christ. That statement drives everything we do as a church, all because we know and we believe. Whoever finds God finds life.