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Hey, Good morning, Sower Nation. It is Friday, April 10th, in the year of our Lord 2026. I'm John David Walt and this is your wake up call. Good morning. Rise and shine. Give God the glory. This is going to be a good day. I'm not saying it's going to be an easy day. It's going to be a good day though, because we're going to do it with Jesus and that's what we're doing here together this morning. Today we're waking up to Jesus together. He's going to teach us. He's going to lead us into the word of God. He's going to encourage our souls. He's going to fill us with imagination for what this day could be like because we only got one shot at it. So how about we go for it? You ready? We're diving in. He's waiting. He's like, listen, would you get through the announcements? I'm like, jesus, I'm not making announcements anymore. We're going straight to the party. Consecration. Wake up. Sleeper rise from the dead. And Christ was will shine on you. Jesus, I belong to you. Okay, just want to make sure you're talking to Jesus. I'm talking to Jesus. We're talking to Jesus. 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. You know, as I think about that prayer, I'm like, lift up my heart to you. That's our feelings, that's our emotions, that's our affection. I lift up my mind to you. That's our thinking, that's our cognition. That's our sense of will, our sense of like. What am I thinking about today? Set my. Fix my eyes on you. That's our attention. That's our attention and our intention. What am I paying attention to today besides my phone? Jesus, offer my body to you. That's my strength. That's my. That's the temple of God. We are moving tabernacles through the world. We are the touch points of heaven on earth. Heaven by Jesus. Presence in us through the power of the Holy Spirit is streaming through us every. Just like it did with Jesus. Heaven is streaming through us everywhere we go. This is the awakening, right? Wake up. This is the truth. Let's don't sleepwalk today. And it coincides so nicely with love the Lord. Your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul, with all your strength, your body. All right, just free insight here as we're, as we're getting going. You ready? We're going to turn to the Word of God now. Today's entry is entitled why God's Plan is Not for My Life. That's kind of provocative. Okay, hang with me. Our text today, Ephesians 1. We're up to verse 9. We're reading 9, 10, and 11 today. Isn't it great? Just to slow walk through the Bible. Hear now the word of the Lord. God has now revealed to us his mysterious will regarding Christ, which is to fulfill his own good plan. Underscore that. And this is the plan. At the right time, he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ. Everything in heaven and on earth. Furthermore, because we are united with Christ, we have received an inheritance from God, for He chose us in advance, and he makes everything work out according to his plan. Wow. The Word of the Lord. Now consider this. These blessings keep coming and are beginning to pile up. All of them invite a lifetime of attention and reflection. Here are four more verses from here. Four. Four more of these blessings from verses seven and eight of the previous reading we didn't even get to mention. He purchased our freedom with the blood of His Son, number one. Number two, he forgave our sins. Number three, he pours out his grace and kindness on us. And number four, he showers us with all wisdom and understanding. Wow. I just. I love seeing them in our. In our workbook. They're bullets. Like the inheritance, the benefits, the blessings. Think of these and more of them to come, like puzzle pieces of a large, intricate puzzle. For now, let's call the puzzle every spiritual blessing. Remember that comes back from a few verses even before yesterday. Every spiritual blessing. We have opened the box. We have turned. Here's the box. We've opened the box. We've turned all. The puzzle piece is over. That's the first thing you do. And Paul is now beginning to sort them for us. We are putting together a massive puzzle. Isn't that a great image for our lives? I don't know about you, but I've spent most of my time just trying to get all the pieces of my own life together and on the table for assembly. I thought my life was the puzzle. Paul shows us. The puzzle is infinitely larger, cosmic in dimension, exquisitely brilliant in design, and intimately personal in its detail. You know the secret to putting a puzzle together, don't you? Have you ever tried to assemble a Jigsaw puzzle without looking at the box top. The secret is seeing the big picture. That's what the Holy Spirit is up to through this revelatory letter from Paul to the church. Check it out from the text. God has now revealed to us his mysterious will regarding Christ, which is to fulfill his own good plan. The puzzle is the big picture. The puzzle isn't my life. The puzzle is the big picture. And though my life is in pieces, it's only one piece. The pieces of my life will come together when I find out where my peace fits into the hole. Even better, without my peace, the whole is not complete. The best news, Jesus is bringing everything together. Isn't that what the text is saying? And this is the plan. At the right time, he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ. Everything in heaven and on earth. I think the challenge for so many of us, particularly Americans, is that we think God has a wonderful plan for our lives. For my life. Indeed he does. It's just not all about my life. The picture on the box top of this puzzle is not my life, but God's plan. The point of the Bible is to reveal God's plan and with the gifts of the church, to reveal to us how our lives fit in, connect, and gloriously serve the whole of it. God has a plan, but it's not for my life. The plan is his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. My life and your life matter more than we could possibly imagine, but we have little idea of it until we begin to glimpse the box top. Yes, our lives can feel like jigsaw puzzles in and of themselves. And they are. It's when we see how the piece of the puzzle of our lives fits into the larger plan that the dislocated pieces of our lives will come together and in myriad marvelous fashion. Until then, we we will continue to be puzzled. God's plan. Repeating God's plan is not for my life. My life is for God's plan. Do you see the difference? It's a big orientation shift. Let's pray. Abba Father, we thank you for your son Jesus, through whom all things have been created and who holds all things together, including our lives, including my life. So set us free from our endless focus on ourselves, on me. Set me free from me. Reveal to me the beauty of the bigger picture. We're praying in Jesus name. Amen. The journal prompts today. How might you lift your focus off of what feels like the messy jigsaw puzzle of your own life to see the bigger picture and plan how does this puzzle image help you process what God is up to in the scriptures? And why does seeing the bigger picture and plan matter so much for the smaller picture of our own lives? Well, that, that's a lot to take in. I'm. I'm looking up a, a song that I just thought of that would be great to sing. Open our eyes, Lord, we want to see Jesus. I don't think that's in our, in our hymnal. Maybe I should look. But you know what, we're live, so we're just, we're just rolling with it. I've got the lyrics here. We're going to sing it in a minute. It's an old song, it's a chorus and it says, open my eyes, Lord, I want to see Jesus to reach out and touch him and say that I love him. Open my ears, Lord and help me to listen. Open my eyes, Lord, I want to see Jesus. See that, that's the, that's the centerpiece of this puzzle. It's Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead. He's like. When you get the center right, everything starts to come together around the center. And the trouble, and this is the fundamental brokenness of the human race, of me and of you is from the Garden of Eden on like. We think we're at the center of the picture and we, we try to orient everything to revolve around us and to come together around us. You know, even as babies. We do it to survive and then it just ingrains deep in our personality and we wind up using and manipulating and, and all. We're doing it for the good of the whole. We're doing it for the good of others. That's, that's the sanctified version of that. But it's not true. We're trying to revolve the thing around us and it won't work. And you can go decades doing that. That's what selfishness means. That's the self driven life. And you, you just can't help it. The reason you that we do it is because we've not found a better God. And so we ourselves take that place in the Bible. The story of God is saying, wake up. I'm gonna. I've come all the way down. I've come all the way into your neighborhood. I've come all the way to your house and I'm knocking on your door. All the things that you thought about me from all the broken religions and broken religious teachings and moral failures of the Christian leaders, let that go. That's not me. He's like, open up the door, it's me. And I'm about to sit down at the table with you. We're going to share a meal together, and I'm going to teach you who you are and why you're here and your life is. Is about to come alive. You're not even going to need all those substitute sources, those counterfeit sources to keep you going. You're. You're not going to need all the things you needed you thought you needed before all. You don't need all that money. You're going to become generous. You don't need all that alcohol. You don't need all that nicotine. You don't need all that self sort of worth teaching. You don't need it. All you need is me. I'm coming in. I'm going to renovate your soul. I'm going to make you alive. I'm going to put the piece, the puzzle together. You're going to find your place in this thing, and it's your life revolving around my life revolving around Jesus. I don't know. I could keep going. I got to sing. You ready to sing? Open my eyes, Lord, I want to see Jesus to reach out and touch him and say that I love him Open my ears, Lord, and help me to listen Open my eyes, Lord I want to see Jesus See, we're praying that he would open the eyes of our heart. That's where we're going in Ephesians. That we would begin to see beyond what just our eyes can see, but that we would begin to behold who he is and what he's doing. Let's sing it again. Open my eyes, Lord I want to see Jesus It's a prayer to reach out and touch him and say that I love him Open my ears, Lord, and help me to listen Open my eyes, Lord I want to see Jesus I just. I just hope you'll sing that, that simple song until you're actually singing it to God. It's a prayer. We know it's one that he'll answer, but sometimes he's just waiting on us to, like, catch up with our song, catch up with the dislocated pieces of our lives and realize it's just all over the place. And we're just doing our best just to try to hold it together. He's like, would you just let go? Can you just let go of trying to hold it all together? And could you take hold of the one who is actually holding it together, holding you together? It's a whole, it's a much better life. That's Jesus. That's the risen Lord Jesus Christ knocking at your door. You can you hear that knocking? You don't even need to look at the ring camera. That's. That's Jesus. Just say, come in. It's Friday. I need you to come in, Jesus, I need your help. But actually I want you. I want you. I want to know you. I want to hear your voice. I want to see Jesus. All right, thanks for the extra minute today. It's Friday, guys. You're going to come across a lot of different people today. Just be ready. Your eyes are open because you're seeing Jesus. You're going to see them in a different light and Jesus is going to see them through you. That's what sowing is. Just letting him lead you through the day. In your interactions and your casual acquaintances and your deep friendships, in your co workers at school, other kids, just being awake to Jesus and like, what are you doing? What do you want to say today? What are you doing today? Today, Jesus, where are you taking us? That's sowing. Awakened people. Awakened people. All right, get your seeds, I got mine. We'll see you on the field for The Awakening. I'm J.D. walt.