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I want to begin by just saying thank you, one to Ambush and others for inviting me to be able to be a part of this. I do have a lot of church members, because I'm from a whopping hour away, who come and they're a part of Gold Lake. And so I just want to thank you for investing in your family. We need more people investing in their families. And some of you are truly making sacrifices to come and be a part of this, or you're supporting others to come and be a part of this so that they can invest in their family, and they wouldn't be able to do it otherwise. I want to say thank you because we need more of that. We need more fathers being fathers and more mothers being mothers and praying over their children and leading them well. So thank you so very much, and I'd like to invite you to come grab me. I don't really know many of you. I know the Verleas, and I know the vanderworkers are here, and I know my wife, and that's it. So grab me. I would love to pray for you or just if you go, man, hey, what do you think about this? What's the word of God say? I'd love to be able to speak with you if you don't know my heart for that is because I had the privilege for seven years serving outside of New York City and in Greenwich, Connecticut, where you're looking at about 1.5% of people who know Jesus Christ. That's it. Wealthiest zip code in America, but yet nobody knows Jesus. They don't need God. They've got everything that they could imagine. The teenagers driving to high school had far nicer cars than I did. I drove a 1912 Volkswagen something, and they would drive these new Porsches and Lamborghinis or whatever it is. And they didn't have a need of God. And so what I would do is literally every morning I would start work, partly because my office had mold growing in it. When they hired me to go pastor Greenwich Baptist Church, they said, make it work or we shut down. A lot of incentivizing. We're down to about 55 people. When I got there, I grew it to about 35 people. And then God took over from there. But I would sit the first three to four hours every morning at Starbucks. And over the course of years, they got to know me as that Christian pastor guy. People would come to me and they can I step off the stage? Okay, cool. They would just step off, and they would come to me and say, hey, you're the guy who disagrees with homosexuality or whatever it is. And I'd be like, and angry, angry people, all these Ivy Leaguers. And I would just. First of all, hey, I'm Joel. And by the way, I feel lame for not having a cool name like Ambush or Hoedown or whatever. I'm Joel, okay? But I would say, hey, I'm Joel. Why don't you have a seat? I'll buy you a cup of coffee. And we would start having conversations, and these are people who would literally be angry at God and all types of things. And I just got to love on them and pour into them. And over the course of playing tennis with people, which I don't play tennis, and sitting on their boats or whatever it is, we started seeing a lot of people come to know Jesus. And it warmed my heart because it gave me a way to just step in and to minister to them. And Amen. I would love for you to come and grab me at any time. And I'd love to pray with you, hear about what's going on in your life. You never know who's standing in front of you and what they're walking through when it comes to life. Here's how we're going to fight this week. I'm a fighter. I'm a coach. I'm not a counselor, necessarily. Everybody knows that about me as well. But I want us to have some scripture memory. I picked one that most of you should already know. You're coming to a Bible camp, right? Is that what you refer to, this family camp? You should know some scripture. Amen. You should get excited when somebody says, let's open the Word of God, right? Who's ready for the Word of God? Ephesians 2, 8, 10. I'm not preaching from that. We're gonna memorize it this week. Most of you know it, but we're going to unpack it. Everybody, if you say it in a different translation, I get in trouble all the time because I memorized everything in the old school NIV. Like 1983. And so I keep. And then. So then I have other translations behind me, and then I screw it all up. But this is what we're going to do. Ephesians 2, 8, 10. Go ahead. Let's read this together. And each day we're going to remove it. We'll have it up here briefly. By the end of the week, we won't have it up here at all. Fair. Okay, here we go. Ephesians, chapter two. Let's start this together for by grace, you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing. That we should walk in him. You're so old school. I love it. I love it. So we're going to just walk through this, and I'll speak about that verse a little bit as we walk through the week with the adults, because there's so much to unpack there. So many people go, oh, I'm. I'm. His workmanship. Yeah, you are to fulfill his purpose, to fulfill his will, to give him glory, to give him honor. And we're going to be able to speak about that. We're going to be walking through some of my favorite parables this week. But before we even dive into that, I want to do one last thing. I want to introduce my family. So I have one wife, praise God. And then a couple of my daughters are here. So Melissa, Kate, Ashley, and then one of my sons, Bennett. My other son, who just got married two weeks ago, is showing up this afternoon with his wife who used to be a counselor here. It's not worthy of that, but it's cool. And so they're gonna show up this afternoon. Here's the thing with my wife. I'm gonna talk about her for a little bit. She didn't know I was gonna do this, but I have the microphone and she doesn't. She's remarkable. She's amazing. We've been married now 25 years, and let me tell you what we did for our 25th anniversary. I just did absolutely nothing. That's what happens when you get old. You run a ministry and you have lots of kids and they're getting married and all this kind of stuff. But she's remarkable. Here's the thing about my wife is she has learned, hopefully over the years, she can't tell me anything. If she says, hey, I was thinking, I would like xyz. I'm figuring out immediately how to get it for her. Any other husbands like this, right? If not, you need to learn. Your marriage will be better. I just love her. And I remember we had just gotten married 25 years ago. We lived in this small little house that I bought the day before I even met her. It was a huge piece of property. I think it was 13 acres. Like, you could cut it with a pair of scissors. The grass, but the backyard, tiny little thing. I was like, well, here's a good thing about having such a small piece of property, is that you can make it really nice, pretty easy. Buy a pot of flowers, you're done. And she wanted an English cottage Garden in the backyard. I didn't know what that was, but within a year, I had nine foot sunflowers growing in our backyard. And then one day she goes, man, it'd be cool if we had one of those picket fences. I'd never built a picket fence. And so I was like, I'm going to build a. Cause I was a. You know, I was a youth minister. I was. I was just po. You know why they say PO's? Because you couldn't afford the O and the R. So you just po. You've never heard this before. You'll catch up. So she wanted a picket fence. Now, this is not the size of the picket fence, but she wanted a picket fence. I had never built a picket fence before. So this is what I ended up doing. I had the first picket, I went and got it. I was even cutting all the little curvatures and everything else because if you just go buy them, they're more money. And again, I was broke. And so I went and got all the pieces of wood that I needed and I was cutting everything. And I took the first picket and I made sure she wanted a four foot picket fence. And so I was like, okay, this is going to be perfect. This is what it's going to look like. I took the first picket and then I took it and I cut the next picket, right? Any wood people out there? And then I took the second picket and I cut the third picket. Stop, someone. That was rude. Somebody's already laughing at me. I took the third picket and I cut the fourth picket and the fourth picket and cut the fifth picket. And I took the fifth picket and took out the what picket? Sixth picket. And what I didn't recognize is because of the way that I was doing it, that this picket was cutting this picket and this picket was being measured to cut that picket and so forth. I was losing almost an eighth of an inch every picket. And by the time I got to about the eighth picket, I had already lost an inch. And I started nailing everything in. I was going fancy. I wasn't using nails, I was using screws. And so I started screwing everything in. And I looked and I was like, that ain't right. And I recognized because in time, what I did is I started adapting what the true measurement was by using the next one. You used the same original picket for every single cut. Otherwise you're going to end up with a different measurement. You're following me. This is the problem with what we've done with the word of God, because some of us know more about our pastors than we do Jesus. Some of us know more about the. Whoever is most popular on YouTube or whatever it is, we know more about them. Here's one of my biggest burdens is we have forgotten how to make much of Jesus without first making much of a person. It should be the other way around. That deserves an amen. I'm from the South. People talk back to me. All right. By the way, did I see people from Canada? That is so dope. Absolutely. I have so many questions for you guys. Not right now, but later find me. I have so many questions. I do think that this is what the struggle is within, how we even understand the word of God today. Because all of a sudden, what we keep doing is we keep making minor adjustments and alterations to truth to fit whatever we desire. And then all of a sudden, this guy who learned from that guy. Well, we're not even learning from that guy. We're learning from another guy and then another guy, and we start to dilute the truth and the power of the word of God. And I know why we do it. But throughout history, we keep trying to emulate our teachers, but our teachers should be emulating Jesus, and we're to sit under the teaching of other people. I think it's great to admire them and to learn from them and to grow from them, but the ultimate goal is not to look like them. It's to look like Jesus Christ, the son of the living God. That's the goal. That's what we want to try to do in everything that we're about. And so, yes, learn from others, grow from others. 100%, admire others, but emulate Jesus. Sit under his teaching. And, man, recently somebody came to me, I'm like, where do you go every day in the morning just to jump into the word of God? They go, I just listen to a podcast now. Stop. I have one. Stop. Nothing will ever replace the living word of God. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. You will naturally dilute its power, its strength, and its significance in your life. So, yeah, the parables are important for me. Here's what I love about the parables. I'm going to give you a summary of what the parables are doing. All right, So I don't know if you're note takers or not, but you're about to learn a lot about why parables. And then we're going to walk through some of my favorite. Yes, a short one today, but walk through some of the favorite ones that I have because I haven't been able to teach on Parables in many years, and I miss it. So. So here's what parables are. We already know they're simple stories, often with imagery conveying a deep teaching. That's what they're going to do. They often refer to everyday things, such as a woman baking bread, parable 11. And they're going to refer to something that they could understand in the everyday. And then Jesus is going to use it to teach a significant truth. There's always one primary purpose to every parable. They're secondaries, which is good, but there's always one primary truth. It often refers to the kingdom of God and the significance of the kingdom of God. If you don't know. The reason I love the parables is parables are actually about a third of the teachings that we have of Jesus in Scripture. A third. So whenever you have a third of what Jesus is saying, you need to be aware and familiar with what they are. You're going, well, how many parables? Say how many parables? I don't know, roughly 35 to 40. Why? Because some there's semantics, but people are like, oh, it's the parable of the mustard seed. And a lot of people go, no, that's a figure of speech. That's not a parable. And so now they're arm wrestling over those kinds of nuances rather than reaching lost people with the Gospel of Jesus. That's another whole sermon. So we start looking at the parables of Jesus. About a third of Jesus teachings on the parables. There's always one primary theme, roughly 35 or 40. But then you've got other figures of speech that it goes into as well. They matter significantly. Why? Because the words of Jesus are the words that heavenly Father teaches. I'll give you two passages about what that even means. John 8:28. John 8:28. You see it behind you. So Jesus said, when you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he and that I do nothing on my own, but I speak just what the Father has taught me. I teach what the Father has taught me. Significant for you to know. Another one would be John 14:10. Hopefully you're familiar with John 14. What an incredible chapter. But it says, don't you believe that I am in the Father and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you, I do not speak on my own authority. Rather it is the Father living in me who is doing his work. And so he's going to be speaking these parables that are given, they are the words of The Heavenly Father as well. And he's going to be speaking to a Jewish audience. You got to remember the contextualization of everything. He's going to be speaking to a Jewish audience who's accustomed to stories being told to them. Remember, the Word of God was all oral. In fact, I love what was being spoken about previously with Ken and Rene about what they're doing with the Word of God. I absolutely love it. Most of the Bible translations we have out there today actually need. That still need to come to fruition or oral because the people in those communities can't read. And so the people of the New Testament Church, a lot of them, they weren't reading either. A lot of it was passed down orally. We already know that as well. We find parables, by the way, in the Old Testament. People don't understand that. You look at first Samuel or no go second Samuel 12, 1 7. David was coveting Bathsheba. You remember that story? Okay, good. Yeah. Okay, I recently. Listen, I have to ask. Recently I was preaching and I said, well, everybody knows about David and Goliath. And somebody came to me afterwards. They're like, who's David and Goliath? Because we're reaching so many lost people. They have no clue what the word of God is. So here's David and Bathsheba. And David was arranging to have her husband killed. Nathan came to David, told him a story, and he's like, hey, there were these two men living in a certain city. He gave him a parable to help understand what he was doing. So we have him in the Old Testament as well. Again, Jesus using earthly things to lead our mind to heavenly things. That's what it's doing. It's an earthly story with a heavenly meaning, something to process. Each of the four gospel contains the parables of Jesus. There are some that are unique to individual gospels. You got the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. Be covering one of those later on in the week. They're only found in the Gospel of Luke. Absolutely amazing. William Barclay, you should know that name as a theologian and author. Wrote a lot of commentaries. He says that the parable is essentially a sword to stab your mind awake. It's a great visual, isn't it? Debata. Process it. So today we're going to begin with the wise and the foolish builders. Matthew 7. So if you open up the word of God to Matthew 7, that would be great. I want to give you a quick summary all the way up to Matthew 7, because you need to understand the Contextualization of it. Matthew, chapter one, really important. I just finished teaching a course on the Old Testament and I love actually the intertestamental period. 400 years of silence, right? From Malachi on, we already know that. And then all of a sudden, in Matthew chapter one, it begins precisely according to the plan of God himself, with genealogy. It has to prove that Jesus is of the line of who? David. Really important. Remember, there's over 300 prophecies from the Old Testament that Jesus is going to fulfill every single one of them over the course of thousands of years. Right. It's remarkable. And so Matthew chapter one, it's going to start with genealogy. Then at the end of chapter one, going into chapter two, it's going to have the birth of Jesus Christ. That's important for us to recognize. Matthew, chapter three, it's going to have his baptism. Remember, he was baptized by who? John the right. You got to know that. We're going to have class participation. So Matthew chapter three, you got. All of a sudden, Jesus is coming to John the Baptist, you need to baptize me. And he's like, I'm not even fit to untie your sandals. What are you talking about? You got to do it. You don't have a choice. Okay? Right. I don't think there was that sound effect, but it would have been cool. Matthew chapter three, Matthew chapter four is important because it begins with what? Matthew chapter four, verse one. And following, you've got Satan tempting Jesus in where? The wilderness. For how many days? 40. And so all of a sudden that exists. And then in the next chapter begins what? His Messianic ministry. Remember, he lived for about 30 years before he stepped into the Messianic ministry. And so all of a sudden he's going to do that. And he begins with such force. I don't think we recognize. We always think of Jesus as being this mild, calm, flowing like. I never know how his hair is always so perfect in pictures. And I do think that was him. While at the same time, look at the way he began his Messianic ministry with the Beatitudes. Matthew 5, 6 and 7. That's the sermon on the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 5, 6 and 7. You now know the first seven book chapters of the Book of Matthew and how it's progressing. So he steps into his ministry. And even as he steps in and he's giving the Sermon on the Mount, yes, he begins with the Beatitudes, but he starts to preach in a way that meant he was ruffling feathers. He was a feather Ruffler. That's my name. Ambush. Hoedown. Feather Ruffler. I think it could work. It just hit me in that moment because that's kind of what I do everywhere I go is I ruffle feathers. But I look at it. That's what Jesus was doing. He was stepping into a system, a religious system that did not like what they were hearing and what was going to be communicated to them. Now he too is going to begin with parables pretty fast. We're going to see it in Matthew chapter 7. Let me remind you of this. The weather of Palestine. How many people have been to Israel? Anybody? Okay, Phil, I'd say we need a field trip. We need to go. Not right now. Maybe let's wait a little bit, let things simmer down over there. Remarkable. I remember walking up to where Jesus gave this sermon and I wept. My parents, I didn't know this, they saved money for me for over three years so that when I graduated seminary, they could send me as a gift to Israel. Isn't that cool? I challenge you to do the same for somebody else. Because I stepped here and I go, wait, this is where. And they're like, yeah. And I just start crying. I mean, it is a natural amphitheater and you can see it. And you start to hear and know the words that were spoken out of Jesus mouth. And as he's speaking them, he's going, man, he knew that that area, they're either in a rainy season with a rainy season with flooding, or it was just dry. It's one of the two. I had a privilege. I went and I had a guy as a roommate who went over there. He's like, I wanted, he wasn't a Christian. He wanted to see if the Jesus thing was real. And I ended up by the end of the trip as a 23 year old, baptizing him in the Jordan River. But guess what? It was hard to find a place to baptize him because it was the dry season. And in that area, the dry season, I mean, you're like, oh, there's a Jordan. Let's go over there. And it'd be like that deep. It's hard to press his face in that much. It got awkward. And so then all of a sudden you have to go certain locations to find a place deep enough to be able to baptize them. But we found one and I raised them up out of the water. And you. I just was going, wait, wait. Heavenly dove. Holy spirit. I'm like, oh, it was so amazing. Field trip tomorrow. We're going because it was so dry. So Jesus is speaking to these people, and he knew it was either rainy season and things are flooding where houses would wash away, or it's completely dry. And so knowing that, literally the Jordan could become a raging river in places 6, 7, 8, 10ft deep, even today, other times, you have places that are literally six inches. So that's the contextualization. He knows who he's speaking to, guys. He knows who he's talking to. And then this is what he says after giving this amazing sermon. He's going to conclude it with the challenge that punches them in the stomach. All right, so this is Matthew, chapter seven 24 through 27. Matthew, chapter seven, 24 through 27. Will you please stand for the reading of the Word of God? Therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. Now, remember, I'm going to interrupt here. He just taught them other things, right? He just taught them how to pray. He just taught them about fasting. He just taught them about how you shouldn't lust. And he taught about divorce and about the different oaths. And he taught them about how to love your enemies. And he was messing with them. I mean, he taught. There was a lot of divisiveness. The very things that are dividing our nation today are the very things that Jesus was teaching. And by the way, if the nation needs to divide in order for the Lord to have his way, may the nation divide sooner rather than later. Because at the end of the day, what happens? Every knee bows, every tongue confesses that Jesus is Lord. And he's teaching all these things today. One day. I'm telling you now, man, I've got so many stories for you. I'm sorry. Just. You're good. Stand up for a moment. I have to stand up the whole time. You can stand up, too. I work a lot with ADF Alliance Defending Freedom. They fight for our religious liberty. I don't know if they've ever been here or not. You got over 300 attorneys, primarily in D.C. defending people like the Cape Maker in Colorado and everything else to keep our religious freedom. I was over there doing some consulting work for them in leadership, and I just grabbed a couple of the attorneys and the people who run it. I said, I've got a question. How long they're in the White House every day. They're dealing with all kinds of issues, dealing with the Supreme Court, et cetera. I said, how long if you stop doing what you're doing? How long is it before I say Jesus loves you? Here's the word of God that that's considered hate speech, and I can't do it anymore without going to prison. They said 10 years max. We need to wake up. We need to wake up. So he's doing Jesus is speaking hard truth, and he says, therefore. Now remember, therefore, if you go to Chapel Point, you know, this therefore means because of. As a result of. As a result of everything he just preached. If you hear these words and you put them into practice, you're a wise man who builds your house on the rock. Petra Petros, One's rock bed, one's rock itself. The rain came down, the stream droves the winds, blew and beat against that house, yet it did not fall because it had its foundation on the what? Okay, but everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like, a foolish man built his house on sand. The rain came down. Remember? They're like, oh, yeah, I know what he's talking about there. The rain came down, the streams rose and the winds blew, beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash. This is the word of God. You may be seated. So think of two men, they built a house probably in a dry bed of a stream somewhere in a valley. One man thinks little about what might come because he's going to work as hard as he can. He's going to build it in a good place, but you got another guy who builds it on a place that is not good. And then when the rains come, it floods and it washes it away, right? I mean, they would have understood this. I just came back from a conference out in California, and there's an area there in San Diego, and they're pointing to all these houses that are worth millions and millions of dollars. And I'm like, yeah, that'd be kind of nice. I mean, if I stole all the money my church has ever given, that'd be doable. And they said, actually, the irony is they're all worth millions of dollars, but they all have to pay cash because no insurance company will actually come into play, because they know that that's going to fall into the ocean one day. Similar to that, it's kind of like, hey, wait, you know you're about to spend $5 million on a house that they won't even insure because one day it's going to collapse. Well, the foolish guy was doing that. Hey, you're gonna build in an area where, you know when it floods, the water's gonna Come and wash us away. And you're gonna invest all this time and all this energy, all these resources into something that you know one day is going to vanish. And so I love noticing that the somewhat. I would refer to it as a juxtaposition in terms of some of the descriptions that God uses in his word, wise and foolish. He doesn't offer middle ground here. I love that. By the way, wouldn't you say that there are opposites? Wise, foolish. I mean, Proverbs has a tremendous amount to say about it. Book of Proverbs. So you have wise and you have foolish, which, by the way, is a believer. Everybody thinks that there's this giant chasm and you're somewhere. I'm not doing that. Great. But I love Jesus. And then these people that really love the devoted ones who really know the word of God and really going to stand for him and speak on his behalf. No, there is a line. Either you stand for Jesus or you do not. There is a line, I'm sorry, And here there's a line. You're either wise or foolish. And so then we're kind of forced to examine whether or not we're wise or whether or not we're being foolish in the way that we choose to live our life. He's going to call out right away in verse 24, everyone who hears, he says that again, by the way, in verse 26, everyone who hears. So twice. Anything that Jesus repeats, I mean, if he says anything, you should be like, okay, but if your parents said something to you twice, I just. I know. I knew I had to listen because if they said it to me a third time, I would no longer be living. That's the way I grew up. Everyone who hears, are you hearing me? He says, verse 24. Again, verse 26, everyone who hears, are you hearing me again? And the people who hear, by the way, are those who hear the message of Jesus, listen, understand it, and then they actually do something about it. There is no true absorption of truth if there is no action to play it out and to live it out in your life. It's called a nice notion. It's a nice idea. So we understand that. And so he's going to. It's remarkable to think about because he's giving them a parable, an understanding. And there's probably some people who would even say this is just a figure of speech and not a parable, whatever. But you go back earlier in Matthew, chapter 7, verse 13 and 14. He's helping them to understand these words, these. You should know, he says, enter through the narrow gate. He's about to let them know the difference between narrow gate and wide. Wise and foolish, that's what he's doing. So just literally right before this, he says, enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction. Many enter through it. They're going to build their life on something that has no chance of lasting. But small is the gate, narrow the road that leads to life. And only a few find it. But the ones who do build their house on the solid rock. And so the invitation really is saying, enter the narrow gate, it leads to life. Now they struggled though, because they had false prophets, they had all kinds of, of even false profession being made. He's letting them know you're going to be deceived. It's going to be a hard choice, but you have a decision to make and how you're following Jesus Christ. Here's another way to. Let's go back to this as we start to wrap up a little bit. You have the picket fence. This is in your own life, something that you've done right. You know, by the eighth one, it's an inch shorter and it doesn't really look as much like this. By the, you get to the next section, 2 inches shorter. The next section. Like if you looked at the fence as a whole, it'd be jacked up. It would start with four foot pickets and end with two and a half foot pickets. It'd be weird. But we've done that in our own life. Anything you are willing to finally tolerate, if there's something in your life that is still a sin that you're tolerating, in time it will become acceptable and in time it will then become worshiped. I mean, I could go down the understanding of this world when it comes to biblical marriage. What you are willing to tolerate today will be worshiped at some point in the future because you're not modeling after the original anymore. You just keep making those slight adjustments and I want you to be able to process that a little bit today. Go. What are those areas of your life that you have slowly just given away? You ever heard the song Casting Crowns? It's a slow fade. I would sing it for you, but I suck at singing, so let's not do that. But it tells us it's just a slow fade until you give your life away. Maybe it's with what you're looking at online, one thing leads to the next and then to the next. That's why if you work for me. You're actually required. I pay for it, of course, but I've got 70 employees at the church and they're all on protected mechanisms, on their devices. If they don't want it, if they're unwilling to have it, they simply don't work for me because I know it's a slow fade, and all of a sudden you start to give your eyes to something else. For some of you, maybe it's schooling or maybe it's your friendships, maybe it's your words, your actions. But there's something in our life that sometimes is a slow fade and we just start taking. I tell our church all the time, I really do believe when it comes to Satan. I'm walking through the armor of God at our church right now, and I tell them, and I'm like, satan doesn't go. Here's a great believer in Jesus, and the next day they're gonna just follow Satan. By the way, Satan is real. We would do well to start remembering that Satan is real. He is not a mythical figure. Now, he's not omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent like God is, but he wants to take you down. But we can all be reminded that Jesus has already won. He kicked his butt. Woo. Right? Can we get a woo? I love it. We start looking at the way he works. He doesn't want you. He knows you're not going to do that. He just wants you to take one small step toward him. I want to say this every week to our church so that remember, he just wants you to take one small compromise. One small compromise in the way that you speak. One small compromise in stealing from your company. One small compromise in leaving work early every day because you deserve it. Even though you made an agreement that you would stay there until 5 o'. Clock. One small compromise in your integrity, One small compromise in your character. One small compromise in the way that you speak to your wife or your husband. One small compromise in the second look that you had at someone else. The word of God says all things are permissible, not all things are beneficial. Right? And so here he's going, which one will you be? Wise or foolish? Wise or foolish? I have no idea how long I have, but I'm just going to keep going for a moment. I really don't have any idea how long I have. So I have two minutes. Okay. That means I'm a preacher. That means five. Okay. All right. Awesome. Thank you. Ambush. Why do we make wise versus foolish decisions? This is what you got to know. It's just because of the voices you listen to. What are you buying into? Like, if you're honest with yourself, what voices? This is something as a family. It's a family camp tonight, like this afternoon, say, hey, what voices had the most influence in your life? Right now? Ask that question. Ask the question. Is it social media? One of the best decisions I've ever made is this December. It'll be four years that I'm essentially not on social media now. My name is. The church is. I don't deal with any of it. I have people who do that, right? They're awesome, they're amazing. Because honestly, for me, it's not that it's wrong, but for me it wasn't healthy because I was comparing everything. God has blessed our ministry in ways the verlies will tell you. Like we're just a bunch of yahoos and God is showing up people sitting on the floor at times because they can't find us. I'm like, this is cool, let's go. But it wasn't healthy for me. And I started to think more about what others might think of us rather than what God already said of us. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do great things. Hello. Right? And so for me, I needed to step away because that had a greater voice in my life. What is it that has a greatest voice in your life that's shaping your heart, crafting the way you think and the decisions that you make? What is it? Is it your family? I mean, you got some young people in here. I love that we have the young people today. Some of you are like, listen, I love my parents. I just don't want to listen to them. And that might be your rebellious state. You know, young people, if you're below the age of 20, I want to talk to you real quick. Will you please stand up? If you're below the age of 20, stand up. I'm going to talk to you real fast. The world, listen to me, please. The world will tell you that you're young. Go make stupid decisions. Do whatever you need to do. It's a rebellious state. If you love Jesus, that doesn't exist. If you love Jesus, you've already surrendered your heart to something else. So you don't have room to surrender it to the world. You don't have room to go, you know what? I know I'm supposed to go to college and do whatever I want. I can live free and blah, blah, blah. No, you belong to a king, so live for the king. Amen. Don't give into the ways of the world. You live for a savior. You've already surrendered. And so if you want to give your heart to something else, that means you actually never gave your heart to Jesus because you just flippantly gave it to the world. Go live for the King of Kings. He is going to use you in ways you cannot ever dream, ask, or imagine. See Ephesians 3, 20 and 21. You can be seated. So as we wrap up. And parents, thank you for letting me talk to your kids. If I said something wrong, you probably don't belong at a family Christian camp. Jesus, Sermon on the mount. Matthew 5, 6, and 7. What he's doing is they have this, the Pharisees, the religious leaders, the Sadducees, who absolutely just wanted to destroy Jesus because he was changing all their rules. He came to remember he wasn't breaking their laws, but he was coming to fulfill it in a way that they were not expecting. And so all of a sudden, he's showing up, and what he's really been doing is ripping down their paper palace, shredding it to pieces. Not to be vindictive or anything of that nature, but because he's coming in to introduce something so much better. And by the time you get to Matthew chapter seven, he has just destroyed their entire religious security. Their security was found in obeying rules rather than knowing that they were a child of God. Just let that soak for a moment because that might be some of you. It's still in me a little bit, even though I'm a little like. They're like, hey, you can wear shorts or whatever. I can't wear shorts to preach like, it's deep in me. My Father will come back and beat the snot out of me. But they had it to a different level. And so here comes Jesus and he's going to say, hey, which one are you going to be? Wise or foolish? You're going to keep doing things the same way? Or are you going to build your house on me? There's something in your life. That maybe, maybe is being built on sand. Maybe it's just the sand on top of the rock, but you've just compromised it a little bit. And in time, it's going to mess up your foundation that you need to look at, examine in your life and go, I need to replant that on the King of Kings. I've lost my way. Remember, it's not drastic. It's just you, right? It's an eighth of an inch off. It's not much but in a year, it's an inch and a half and you start to surrender something. Maybe it's your finances, maybe your spouse marriages. I'll talk to you real quick. Maybe it's your spouse and you're more of a roommate than one flesh right now because you're just trying to grind it out and you're dealing with all your kids stuff and everything else that goes with it. Psalm18 2. I'll conclude with this. The Lord is my rock. Everybody say that with me. The Lord is my rock. Is he. Think of everything. It's going to be fun to dive into the Word with you this week. I'm glad to be with you. Can I pray for you? God, I want to come before you in the name of Jesus. And I celebrate the fact that we get to open up scripture and start learning about it collectively, together, and what you're going to use it for and how you can shape our hearts and our minds. God, may we have the courage to be wise and not foolish in our decisions. I mean, even the religious may look at our lives and go, man, you're nailing it, man. You're doing everything the right way, but we're just following a procedure. God, I want to be completely abandoned in my heart to you. I want to be completely abandoned of the desires of this world. Because we know that to have your favor and to have your blessing doesn't mean that things necessarily go our way, but it means that you will receive greater honor and greater glory. And we know that this life is temporary, but the King of Kings brings us into an eternal relationship. God, thank you for the eternal relationship and for the marriages that are represented in this room, for the young people that are in this room. God, for the marriages that are even. Maybe there's some. Maybe there's not a huge struggle, but there's just a splinter in that marriage. Remove the splinter and replace it with your grace and your mercy. Remind the people that are here today that you can redeem anyone from anything at any time. Show your favor on them, speak over them, and guide them into your presence. God, surprise every person here this week with your truth and your promises and your beauty. In Christ's name, Amen.