Amen and amen. Is that true or what? Good gracious. Hey church, how we doing? Everybody doing all right?

All right, I have a treat for you. I promise by the time we are done here, you are going to be saying thank you to me. As you know, we've been walking through Ephesians. We talked about wives. We talked about husbands. And the next part in Ephesians 5 is about parenting. And since I'm only up to the 12-year-old level, I have a 12-year-old and a 9-year-old as a

Friday, I'm pretty clueless as to what to do.

And so I thought I would bring in an expert.

And he's not just some random expert that's written, by the way, over 60 books. But Pastor Dougfield used to be on staff at Saddleback Church,

a little country church out in California if you never, never heard of it with a guy named

Rick Warren. And even more importantly in my life, for whatever reason, right when I got out

of seminary, I learned a whole lot of Greek and Hebrew and not one thing on how to actually pastor a church.

And so I read a book by Doug Fields that changed the way I thought about discipleship,

about how to create environments to bring people from come and see to come and die.

So I went out to California just to go to a conference that he was leading.

And by God's grace, Pastor Doug Fields kind of grabbed me and put me under his wing and mentored me for about a decade.

And not only is he an incredible communicator and an author.

In fact, in our lobbies, we have a few of these books left, intentional parenting, that he and his wife Kathy wrote.

And so you're going to want to

hustle out there and get one. I think we only have like 25 left here because 722 bought like 250.

And so sure enough, you're going to see why as soon as he starts preaching here. But even more

importantly than all that, at least in my life, he taught me how to win at church and not lose at home. He's been married forever.

He's got three kids that love Jesus and are grown, and he has been one of the most influential

pastors in my life and ministry. And so 1122 at all of our campuses, would you please stand

and welcome, Pastor Doug Fields.

You're so nice.

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