Yeah, yeah. What's up y'all? You all ready to do this? All right, cool. So, listen, hope you grabbed one of these journals, like was just discussed. Your key scripture today is going to be Luke chapter 15, beginning right at the beginning. We'll get to the keyword here in a minute. So if you didn't grab a Bible on your way in, borrow somebody else's next year or whatever, make sure you bring one when you come back next time or take one of those blue ones. That's our gift to you. Now, here's the deal. Every year around Christmas, I like to take a couple days off and I like to do some reading. And I have some guardrails for that reading that's very similar to when I take a longer vacation. It goes like this. I don't want to read anything that compels me to highlight or underline anything. I simply want to be entertained.

That's all I'm after. So many years ago, I decided I was going to read the hunger games.

Some of you guys remember when that first came out back before there were movies and things like that, and it was all the rage. And I thought, I'll just kind of see what the big deal is.

And man, I picked that book up and I didn't come up for air

till I had read the whole series. I absolutely could not put it down. Well, this Christmas, I read one of

the prequels. There's two prequels now to the original series. And it was the exact same thing.

I just could not put it down. It was such a page turner. And one of the reasons for that is so engaging is

because it's set in the dystopian future of the United States of America. There's been a civil

war and there's the winning capital and there's the losing districts and the capital enforces

itself on the districts by making them participate in the annual hunger games by giving

up two of their children between the ages of 12 and 18, a male and a female from each district

have to go fight in the hunger games, which can only have one victor. It is a battle to the death.

So at the end of the day, it's a story that we can all

understand because it's all about desperation. If you remember a couple weeks ago, Matt Williams

did such a phenomenal job preaching about this idea of desperation. And so this picture is painted

so vividly in the hunger games because what you have is you have kids who are

desperate to go home and you have their parents who are desperate to have them back. Well, in Luke

chapter 15, Jesus is going to paint three vivid pictures of the exact same thing, desperation.

But these stories are told in response to someone and something that is very

key for us to understand. So again, if you got your Bibles, let's go there today. We're going to

beginning in verse one. Check it out. Now, the tax collectors and the sinners were all drawing near

to him, to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled saying this man

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