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Foreign Sower nation. It is Friday, February 27th, in the year of our Lord 2026. I'm John David Walt, and this is your wake up call. All right. Are you ready? It's Friday. What is this one? This is day nine of the 40 days of Lent. Let's just keep reminding ourselves. Right you are here. We are waking up to Jesus today, okay? Because this is the only time today is going to come. It'll be today again tomorrow. But Jesus said, don't worry about tomorrow. This is now. So we got a lot going on. We've all got long lists. The. The. The week is going to run out before the list runs out. In some of our cases, we feel like the week is the month. The. The money's gonna run out before the week runs out. Come on, Lord, we need you. Provide. Give us this day our daily bread. Sometime we should do a series together on the Lord's Prayer. That would be a great wake up call series. Let Jesus teach us how to pray. But that's what we're doing, gang. We're meeting with Jesus in the word of God today. And we're going to win. Right? How? You win the day, win the morning. So consecration, that's where we start. Wake up, sleeper. Rise from the dead and Christ will shine on you. Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you. And we're praying in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Okay, today's entry is entitled From Information to Revelation in our text, Matthew 16. We're still at Caesarea Philippi, guys. We're still in the first full week of, of Lent. That shows you how important this is. Because, you know, we're just not trying to get smarter here. We're not trying to learn more. We're trying to know Jesus more. We're trying, trying to really break beyond the realm of information and into the reality of revelation. That's the dynamic relationship we're going for here. That's why I'm laboring on this. I just felt the Lord really pressing me as I wrote this series. This is awakening. We. We just all are swimming in information. And what we need is Revelation, right? Here we go. Hear now the word of the Lord. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church. And the gates of Hades will not overcome it. The word of the Lord. Now consider this in my first year of law school, I met my favorite law professor. He passed recently. For my money, Dr. Robert Lawrence was the master Yoda of law professors. One day, in the midst of an insanely complex property law class, in trying to get across a concept which was deeply logical and yet defied logic, he said, this one page of history is worth more than 10,000 pages of logic. In legal terms, he was trying to help our obtuse black and white minds grasp something of the relationship between common law precedent and and statutory law, between what actually happened and what should have happened. Here's what I heard. Life trumps theory. Real world experience is more valuable than theoretical preparation. In those days, I was struggling deeply with Jesus as I perceived he was calling me away from a career in the law and into the fields of Amazing Grace. I had no playbook for that, no history or logic to bring to bear in those days, in the spirit of Professor Lawrence's dictum, I experienced my own flash of insight along those same lines. A word of revelation is worth more than 10,000 pages of information when it comes to Jesus, and particularly when it comes to answering the question of all questions, who do you say that I am? What we need is not more information, but more revelation. Isn't this what so excited Jesus that day in Caesarea Philippi with his band of disciples, Jesus replied, blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. In other words, he's like, this didn't come to you by information from somebody else. This was revealed to you by God. You see, this is what I wanted for my first ever confirmation class. I wanted them to learn and to learn to learn by revelation, not just by information. This meant we would need to trade the pursuit of knowledge for the passion of knowing. Isn't this precisely what Paul was praying for his little churches back in the day? I'll quote him. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Glorious Father, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that you may know him better. Something tells me you are ready for this. You're tired of going from one Bible study to the next. You are more than a little weary of learning more things about Jesus. You want to actually know him better, and you've come to the realization that this will require less of you and yet more of you at the same time. You're going to have to shift gears. You will need to shift out of the gear of striving and into the gear of surrender. Less taking on and more letting go. That's enough to process today. Less is more. Letting go of taking more on is better. And in the spirit of Professor Lawrence's dictum, let's give the psalmist the last word on today. Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere. That's Psalm 84. 10. Let's pray together today. Our Father, thank you for your son Jesus and Lord Jesus. We confess we like information. We can manage information. We can manipulate information. We can store information, we can amass it. We like right answers. We like to ace the quiz. We want to learn how to learn by revelation. Come, Holy Spirit, and break through, leading us into the way of knowing you beyond mere knowledge. And we're praying in your name, Jesus. Amen. We're getting deep here. By day nine, we're way in, gang. I feel like we're going somewhere together. You sensing that too? We're not just going through the motions this time. We're jumping into the movement. How about a couple of journal prompts today? I hope you're journaling. I hope you're taking time to. I know you're busy. Okay, I'm busy. We're all too busy. That's why we gotta let go of some things. Stop taking on more and start letting go more. Start moving away. Moving from striving to surrender. That's a. That's a shift. That's a move. So what will it take for you to press past the comfort zone of more information and knowledge and into the realm of revelation and knowing? What in you resists this kind of move? I'm asking for Jesus. Jesus asking. This is. This is the thing you see. Notice when, when, when Peter made that response to Jesus, it was more than just words. It. This was like. It's just like the light. Jesus could see the light going off in him. He could see the mind blown emoji happening over his head. And he didn't say, you know, ding, ding, ding, ding, you know, survey said, right answer number one answer, no. Here's how he responded to Peter that day. He said, you did. You. You got. This came from heaven. This is revelation. You're not just parroting back information to me. This wasn't something somebody taught you, is something that God mysteriously, by his spirit revealed to you. And then he said this. He said, you've told me who you say that I am. Now let me tell you who I say that you are. You're Peter. He just called his name. He'd been Cephas. And this is. This is how Jesus does he. He sort of almost renamed him there. You're Peter means rock. And on this rock, on this kind of rock, on this faith, this revelatory download, if you will. I this me and you, who you say I am, who I say you are, this is. This is where I build my church. This is where I build the thing that cannot come apart, that cannot be deconstructed, that cannot be washed away. Even the gates of hell cannot overcome this reality here that's born of revelation. That's what we're going for, guys. And I went for a long time in church without knowing that. And I think the thing I just want to encourage you today before we sing is if. If I'm talking to you, if, if. If you're sensing like, this is real, or if you're sensing like, I don't get it. I'm not getting what you're saying. Just tell him that. Here's your prayer to Jesus today. If you're getting it, and if you're not getting it, is Jesus, would you wake me up? Because I'm willing to. To be made willing. I Would you, Jesus, wake me up. And if you say it to him, like, really say it to him, Buckle your seatbelt because we're about to go for a ride. Wake me up, Jesus, would you wake me up? Would you shake me awake? I don't want to go sleep walking anymore through this life. I want the real you. All right, let's sing. All right, everybody. There's a lot of new people, dad, that are. That are with us here in this Lenten season. They never been on a wake up call before. I'm sure they've been very surprised that one old guy and one really old guy are singing or. Yeah, their songs, you know. Dad, how old are you?