The

The How's it going? Church of the Highlands. Oh yeah. Come on. Anybody grateful to be in God's house today?

Come on, put your hands together. If you're just thankful, grateful, there is absolutely no place I would rather be than Church of the Highlands on a Sunday morning. Can I get an amen?

And we are just in the middle of God's presence, a moment in God's presence, and we're around God's people. I do hope you like the people next to you. Come on look at the person to your right and say, glad you came to church today. Person on your left, your other choice. Glad they're with you right there at church today. And it is such an honor that we gather together. And, you know, I can physically only see one room right now, but through that camera, we've just

joined together with our entire church family. It's hard to imagine, get our mind around, just

all that God's doing at Highlands. Jill and I've been visiting campuses, and it's just all a miracle.

So we say hello to every location. Anyone joining us online or on demand, of course, the correctional facilities, the state of Alabama now, and I want to remind us, we're also now in the state of Georgia in our first correctional facility. And we welcome those guys. You're part of our church family. And then any deployed military around the world, we honor all of you. I know you're clapping

a lot, but one more time. Let's thank God for our church family. It's been a great month.

I mean, just really, we finished our 21 days of prayer yesterday, and it was powerful with our finale.

We had men's night this past week. Come on, men. All right, that's your chance to make some noise. And so God's just moving in a beautiful way. And you've already heard this from our campus pastors, and I'll get into the message just in a moment. But I want to start by just encouraging everybody as we head into this small group season, just to take your next step. And I'll put this on the screen again as a reminder, but our directory is launching today, and that is either through the app or at Church of the Highlands.com, your chance to go on and look at groups. Give you a full week to shop groups. Look at times, locations, topics, all of that, and even reach out to leaders to find the group that is right for you. And I will tell you, there are still groups being added. We're still training leaders at every location. And so don't just look today, look throughout this week. And then we officially launch our groups next week, August 31st. It's amazing. We're heading into the fall already. And so take that next step. You saw that great testimony with Jeff's story. But I just, I sense in my heart, even just as we step into this season, as a team, myself, as we're walking into this fall,

there is a, it's another level of community that God wants to build.

Where we gather together, of course we experience this presence, we all find freedom and we grow.

But also as we gather together in groups like we saw in that video, it is a lighthouse to our world,

going on that God's people are different, that we dwell in unity. Can I get an amen? And so let's lean in today. It's going to be, or this week, it's going to be a really, really great time.

So today we are finishing out what's been a four-week series called Higher Heights. And it's

been a powerful, practical series that's really, bottom line is this.

If this is your first, you know, installment, go back and watch the other ones. Our heart, my heart,

has been that every single person at Church of the Highlands would have the chance to take that

next step in their personal relationship with Jesus, that the ceiling would be lifted, that you

would experience those higher heights. And that has been my prayer, that has been our team's prayer. We're hearing testimonies of how God is doing that. But I want to just share one angle that I haven't really said in this moment of introducing the series is as much as we want that for you, you need to know today that God wants that for you. It is the heart of God for you to experience more of

him. And so our theme verse, if you want to open up your app for notes in scripture today, our theme

verse for the series is actually the theme verse of the church of the highlands. The verse is all about

...