And we're going to talk about the journey that all of us are own in God and no matter where you are in your journey with God, you can go to another level.

And there's a parable where Jesus actually tells us the pitfalls to watch out for no matter where we are at each level.

And so I'm going to talk to you about that all right the idea for this sermon series we're going to go for four weeks on this up until our Christmas production

But the idea for this series came from a survey that we did here in Gateway and by the way

Pastor Jeffrey the name of our church is Gateway Church not Church on the way

okay this he said a moment ago I don't know if y'all called it. Let's give him a big church on the way, welcome. And that's

Pastor Jack Hayford's church, all right? But this is called gateway, okay? Anyway. But, but we did a survey here at the church, but we participated actually with 525 churches,

all right?

Around the nation and 180,000 people took this survey.

And it was called Reveal.

And the results of this survey,

I was at a conference about a month ago and they showed the results of the survey and talked about the results and what it showed was that every person that's attending church is in one of four groups

and as they begin to talk about this I immediately thought of

Mark four and so I went back and read Mark four and I saw some things

differently than I've ever seen so so I want us to read Mark chapter 4, right? Mark 4 verse 1.

And again he began to teach by the sea and a great multitude was gathered to him so that he got

into a boat and sat in it on the sea.

And the whole multitude was on the land facing the sea.

Then he taught them many things by parables and said to them in his teaching. Now let me just stop here for a minute and tell you the definition of the word parable because we all kind of know what a parable is but from the Greek it's it's interesting to understand this the Greek word is parabola and it

literally means to throw alongside that's what it means to throw alongside now I know

that doesn't help us much just that definition, but let me explain to you why that's the definition for this word.

Jesus is literally throwing a story alongside a truth so that we can understand the truth.

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