Hey this is Stephen Fertake. 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 is moving in your life, enjoy

the message.

Welcome to Church, welcome to the final installment of bars and battles.

Yes, I know how tragic it is for you to learn

that this is our final week of this series.

How many of you have enjoyed it, and then, you got to stop somewhere, I learned that,

and you got to start somewhere, you got to stop somewhere. It's usually harder for me as a preacher to know where to start

the sermon than where to stop it. Because usually I know where I'm going when I start when I start preaching to you I I know where I'm going but I don't always know how to get you into it because well when I first started preaching I just assumed that at the beginning of my sermon everybody was as excited as I was about what I had been learning all week, but I found out they had real lives.

And so you got to start somewhere and sometimes it feels like we have to get our energy to match up.

I when I first started preaching I came in so I came in so hot just come up screaming and yelling and

hollering at the people in the first five minutes and but I found out sometimes you

got to give them time to merge into traffic and

you got to let the caffeine kick in. My pastor, Pastor Mickey, he used to always start his

sermons the same way. Every time he started the sermon, well he would read his scripture and then he would

pray and at the end of his prayer he would end his prayer the same way every single time.

He would pray, read his scripture, he would pray, read scripture he would pray and then he would say

let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight

oh Lord my strength and my redeemer.

And I thought he made that up.

I didn't know he was plagiarizing Psalm 1914.

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