Hello, Bridgetown family. It is good to be with you today and just have an opportunity

to just to share with you just my heart and lieu of some of the things we see going

on our world today. Let's just be honest with one another. We are living in an absolutely

crazy time. We're smashed with the COVID virus and everybody's been quarantined in the house

for a little while. And then on top of that, we have the murder of George Floyd and the

protest and everything is going on. We are in a pressure cooker as a nation. We're in a

pressure cooker as a people. We're in pressure cooker as a church. And today what I want

to do is I don't want to come like I'm a guy that has all the answers because I don't,

in fact, if I'm honest with you today, I'm sharing from my heart, but I really don't feel

like I know exactly what to say or what I can say to be able to help. But there are

just some things that God has placed up on my heart that I believe will be helpful

regardless of how I feel as an African-American man who's kind of going through the struggle

of everything that's happened and so forth. The first thing I want to say is this is that

as believers, it's different if we're talking to non-believers or non-follows of Jesus Christ.

But as believers, our primary objective in goal in life here on earth is to become like

Jesus Christ. We accept Him, we follow Him, and our goal is to be transformed and shaped

into a image. And sometimes we think about discipleship, we think about being formed and shaped

in the image of Christ. There's something that just kind of gets lost in that mindset

as it relates to what we see going on in our world. We have this view many times our

mind that as we become like Jesus, it makes us kind of irrelevant or unable to really grasp,

or understand, or really to be able to kind of articulate what's going on and to have an impact

in the way that the world is going and within the circumstances that the world is experiencing.

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