Hey, this is Stephen Ferdick. I'm the pastor of Elevation Church. And this is our podcast.

I wanted to thank you for joining us today. Hope this inspires you. Hope it builds your

faith. Hope it gives you perspective to see God as moving in your life. Enjoy the message.

Those of you who are here in the room be seated. Let's get started. And those of you who

are a part of our E-Fam, our global extended family. Or as we call it these days, everybody

family, family. Because none of us are really, you know, it's kind of been weird. I always

have the worship team come back out here and sit with me while I preach. One of my

preacher friends was like, why do you do? Why do you have the worship team up there? And

I was like, it's lonely up here, man. And especially, it's kind of ominous, preaching

in an empty auditorium because we built this room for like, I don't know, hundred times

the amount of people that we're allowed to put in here right now. So it's kind of creepy.

I mean, I'm not saying anything bad about those of you all who are here, but it just

looks like the rapture happened and you all weren't living right when it did. We all missed

it. So it's kind of lonely up here on preaching. Are you all the only ones coming back today?

There's more coming. Yeah, even since the first week of when we went into quarantine,

I was like, if you all could just keep some stools back there and when you put your

mics down, grab a stool and come sit with me because it'll just help me to not feel lonely.

And you wouldn't think the pulpit would be a lonely place, but sometimes it can be because

you're bearing your soul for everybody to see. And especially some people have these facial

expressions when you're preaching. They look at you with a very, I don't want to be judgmental

in the way I put this, but they look at you like they never did anything wrong in their

life and they look at you like they might have something better to do. Not everybody

...