I mean it, y'all.

I'm the first one in line who needs a fresh encounter with Jesus today.

And I can sense that I'm not alone and feeling that.

It's just such a joy, but also humbling and partly humiliating to be up here as the person who's supposed to teach you about God.

Do you understand how off that is? As a person who knows myself fully,

you don't know me fully. You see the clothes and the presentation that I have picked out to present to you

right now. You don't see everything that I know to be true about myself. And then in this moment,

sort of laugh to myself to go, oh, now they want to hear you tell them who God is and and tell in this moment sort of laugh to myself to go oh now they want to hear you tell them

who god is and and and tell you this is how you follow him and this is how you should model your

life it's laughable for me i do the best that i can and it's a continual reminder of ultimate

humility because i'm like i have no business standing where I'm standing. But I do believe the

spirit of God speaks through a willing heart and a willing voice. And I believe God has something

so fresh today. I believe it's so much so that I rearrange the preaching schedule to be able to

preach to you today. I was not supposed to. But God laid something on me. And I was like,

are people need to hear that. And they need to hear that in this series. And Matt Cole, we'll let you preach in a couple of weeks, but you've got this new song. You need to release that. And so God just organized this to work out perfectly. But if you're just joining us, I believe you have joined it just the right time. We are in a series called The Way. And this is the ending. And you might be thinking to yourself, why would I be joining at the right time if I'm joining at the end?

Because I believe if you experience what I believe God wants to do over the next few minutes,

you're not going to miss one second of what we've been teaching so far in this series.

This series is all about reframing being a Christian as being a follower of the way.

So 2,000 years ago, believers in Jesus were not called Christians by one another. They were actually called Christians by people who

did not believe in Jesus as a way of making fun of them. Oh, look at those little Christ.

Look at them. They're the Christians. And the first time they were called

Christians was in the church at Antioch. But believers actually called themselves followers of the way.

...