All right. Well, welcome Lake Point family. And let me just say for the first time,

a happy new year, man. It's really good to see you guys. If you guys got your Bibles, head over to Acts Chapter 16. Acts 16. I just need you know, it's been like three and a half weeks since I got to preach. There is three and a half weeks of preach stored up inside of here. So you got to, that's right. You're my favorite section.

I'm going to preach right to this section the whole time, man.

That's the one. So you guys got to listen a little faster today. I just, man, I just want you to know as we're heading into this year that there is something very unique happening in our midst right now that we're just kind of catching momentum. We call it kind of kind of feel like a kite caught in a hurricane of gray. So you probably haven't heard

this yet, but I want to catch you up on how the year ended. And then the momentum we're rolling

into this year. So at our Christmas services where we gathered to come let us adore him,

it ended up despite thunderstorms and the lightning and all that on Christmas Eve, y'all, more than 46,000 people gathered to worship Jesus at Lake Point. And let me just say this, that's amazing. We love when people are here. But what we really love is when people cross from death to life,

from sin to righteousness, from darkness to light. And we ended up ending the year last year

with more than 2,300 people being baptized and entering a relationship with Jesus. And

here's what I know is that some of you guys like,

this is literally the first time that I'm getting to open the word with you

since you took a challenge that I give every Christmas that thousands and thousands of people

have taken me up on to give me one year of your life, is what we say.

And you'll just give us one year of your life, prioritizing the purposes of God and gathering

with the people of God.

I'll make you a promise your life will never be the same and your family's life will

never be the same and your kids' lives will never be the same because what we know is

that like these people who these people are we are people

who have had a head-on collision with a grace train and when that happens to you it like it's going to

mess you up or rearrange some things in your life and and so I'm just going to make a promise to you

that your life literally is never going to be the same because whoever is in Christ is a new creation and the old

is gone and the new has come. And what we know, all of us know here is that man, in the words of my friend, Pastor Jobi Martin, if the tomb is empty, then anything is possible and anything is possible in your life in the hands of Jesus. That you cannot possibly, you cannot, you have not, you never will sin so much that you can wreck your life more than he can redeem it. And so what we're going to do at the beginning of this year, we are like, here's what we do here if you're new, is we open the Word of God and we submit ourselves to the Word of God because under the Word of God comes the blessing of God. And we believe that this word, these scriptures, when we open them, that they are living and active, that they're the only book in the world that when you read it, it reads you. And then it gets inside of you and that it's the only perfect thing on earth and has the power to change you. So we're like 20 weeks into a series that we've been calling, there is more. We're going to take a break and start new series next week. It's going to be fun. But we're in Acts Chapter 16 this week, and I want to talk to you today for a few minutes, especially if you're brand new with us. I want to talk to you about the first thing. It's my first sermon. I don't think it's a coincidence that we ended up in Acts 16, the first thing of first

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