Habits That Help You Love God
Jeremy MacDonald · Tidal Church Moncton · March 10, 2024 · The Domino Effect series
Jeremy MacDonald looks at Jesus fasting in Matthew 4 and Hebrews 4 to offer two simple habits: fasting and reading Scripture before picking up your phone. These small practices help us depend on God, belong to Jesus, and love Him more.
More from Jeremy MacDonald · The The Domino Effect series
Topics: Faith, Prayer, Discipleship
Transcript
[0:58] Time change Sunday and the end of March break. I mean, you guys are impressive. It's wonderful that you're here, and it's wonderful if you're watching this live, if you're catching up after the fact on the old podcast or online because you slept in, just know we're judging you slightly by not being here. But no, we're glad to be together and glad to be in part two of this series that we've called The Domino Effect, where we're wrestling through and thinking through the things in our life, the habits that we could take on that could have an outsized impact. And you've seen dominoes. I mean, this is the concept, and this is the trailer. The idea of, like, you knock over something that's accessible, something that's easy, something that is in front of you, something that you can handle, and it has this effect that ends up moving all the way along the line.
[1:45] And, you know, all the other dominoes fall. The other thing, and this is what happens when you end up talking about dominoes, is that your social feed, or at least my social feed, is now all the domino videos and stories and that kind of stuff. And so the other thing that dominoes can do, and if you've seen this, I think it's fascinating, I wanna show you a short little clip, is that you can take a small domino, and over time, it has the impact, the energy of moving larger and larger and larger dominoes. And from a small little effect, you can see something big and giant happen. If you take a look here, the idea being you start off with something really, really small and that it builds up over time and takes on, you know, more life and gets bigger and bigger. How cool is that? That one's real. And look at the size of that thing that would crush a person. It doesn't, but it does collapse and completely fall apart.
[2:31] But the idea, of course, the principle is, hey, are there things in your life that are small, habit-wise, that have bigger impact? And we're gonna offer you, and as a part of this series, we're offering you specific things that you can do, but also never forget that there's parts of your life, as you think to it. There's maybe parts of your life that you would step back from and realize you've taken on a habit that you need to give up on, because it has this outpaced impact that's even, maybe even for the negative. But the idea all comes from this one book. So we've used this book, and there's this wonderful quote that Justin Earley, from The Common Rule, says. He says, we're all living according to a specific regimen of habits. And those habits shape most of our life. They shape most of your life without you realizing it.
[3:20] There's parts of your life that are just shaped by the ways that you've picked up these habits. And so we're wrestling with these kind of big questions. And for you, no matter where you're at in your journey, no matter what your faith is or why you're here or why you're listening, you can think through these two questions and make changes for the better for your journey and for your life. And these two questions are simply, what should my life look like? What should your life look like? Not what do you want it to look like? What should it look like? Not what is it right now, but what should it be? And if you can understand and cast a vision for what should I be as a husband, what should I be as a dad? What should I look like as a daughter? What should I look like as a student? And then take a step back and think, okay, what kind of habits will actually take me there?
[4:09] What are the practices, the small things that can become big things, the small things that move all the other dominoes around so that I can end up in the place that I want to be? And where it takes you is into places where you end up repeating and doing sometimes the same thing over and over again. My friends that are really fit, my friends that are really strong, my friends that are, you know, or look after themselves physically, they'll talk about the ritual and the habit, the consistency that comes from eating healthy and working out. And you're like, yeah, but is there anything new or different to that? And it's like, no, there's a consistency to these kinds of things that you have to lean into. That's why it's called a habit. And we know this because when we know this internally when we think about our own journeys, but we also know it when you talk to anybody that kind of studies this kind of thing.
[4:56] In fact, a number of years ago I was working on my master's, and I read this book about, and the title being, You Are What You Love. And this author was trying to help us understand and explain the idea that repetition becomes so shaping for us. And sometimes we get nervous when we talk about repetition. Even when we talked about habits last week, moving into this idea of making consistent changes or making a consistent commitment to something, it can feel old. It's like, how long do I do this for? And it's like, well, maybe forever. And you're like, that's a long time. And you're like, yeah, but think about this from other standpoints. And this is what he says, James Smith, he says, we willingly embrace repetition as a good in all kinds of other sectors of our life, you know, to own our golf swing or piano prowess, or a mathematical abilities, for example.
[5:41] You think about things that repetition you enjoy and you lean into. And so for our own lives, could we do the same kind of thing on a grander scale when we consider our habits? And so if you wanna check out the book and what we're kind of referencing, these habits are not mine, that I'm trying them out along with you, if you join me. And it comes from this particular book, The Common Rule, you can see that. And inside you'll discover there is this circle of different habits that we're unpacking each week. It looks a little bit like this. And the idea is that each week will take a weekly habit and a daily habit, and then I'll encourage you to try it. I'm gonna try it myself. And then we build on these over time. And if you join through the whole series and you commit to it all, you'll have eight new rhythms in your life that we think would be really, really valuable.
[6:27] Last week, we talked about in the bottom right hand corner, the idea that we're gonna take some habits, and they're gonna be kind of resistance habits that are gonna help us to love our neighbors. The whole reason for doing this is that we might actually love our neighbors more and love God more. This is the commitment. And as a people, that are looking to follow after God, this is what we're committed to for you, depending on where your journey is at, you pick and choose. I'm not here to dictate you. Pick and choose how you think this will be helpful in your own journey. And you can self-select as much as you'd like. But this last week I tried to stay off my phone for an hour a day, and I failed a couple of times. I just wanna be honest, there's a couple of days. I know you were perfect at it, and you got all seven. There were two days in the middle of the week that I did not turn off my phone for the full hour.
[7:13] And it was interesting, at least for me, in those moments, I don't know if you tried this. It's such a cool experience, but the days that I did it, I felt like in those moments I was looking forward to it. Like something changed in my brain when I would power down my device. And it was almost like I was, it is kind of like you went into hiding, or I went into hiding. It was almost like the world kind of slowed down around me, and all of a sudden the people that I was with in the room were the only people that really mattered in that moment. Like I was so focused, and it was really neat, actually. And the two days that I didn't do it, I was at a conference speaking at an event. And so it made it difficult to do it. And I felt in those moments, like, oh, it was, it was just a miss. I wish that I could have done that. The other habit we tried last week, and if you want to take a look and you can listen to the whole thing, but the idea of curating your media, and this is a practice that has been kind of part of my rhythm, but as I was traveling back from this event, I thought, oh, it'd be fun just to watch a show.
[8:08] I download something from Netflix. And so as is my practice, there was something cool I wanted to watch. I looked it up online and I realized I wasn't really full of content that I wanted to, you know, put in my mind. And so instead, I watched this sports documentary on rugby, which was terrible. And if you like rugby, I don't understand it still. It's very confusing. But that's another message, or not a message, just to lobby conversation if you wanna fight me on that. But the point being is, when you consume media, can you have a practice to at least understand what you're getting into? And so for this week, we're gonna take some habits that help us think about loving God a little bit more, and that if we can move in this direction, that they could actually inspire us in our faith journey. But I think even if you don't have a faith journey, I think these ideas, what they do is they move you away from just assuming you are the locus of all authority in the world and changes your perspective on life itself and your journey.
[9:04] And so for us as Christians, those of us that have chosen to follow God, we expect that God is doing something in our life and in our world. And if we can lean into Him, it kind of broadens our perspective. And if you're not quite there, at least understand that if you can, allow yourself to have some type of practice that moves you beyond seeing yourself as the only important self, it's a really good thing. And as we look at these practices, the important thing you need to know is that just the practice itself isn't really like a commandment. This is a suggestion. It's an idea. The core thing that we're trying to accomplish is we're trying to grow in Christ's likeness, and we use these practices to kind of help with that. In fact, it's one of the commentators says specifically about how Jesus talks about spiritual disciplines.
[9:49] He says that spiritual growth, is not automatically assured through ritual observance of certain spiritual disciplines. And you've seen and experienced this in other people's lives, maybe your journey was that there were like rules and observances around things like the Bible. Like you could never put something on top of the Bible in your home. The Bible had to be at the very top of the coffee table, right? This is some people's practices. It doesn't matter how often you read the Bible, just don't put anything on top of it. It's gotta stay there. It's full of dust. Leave the dust. Don't put something else. And so the ritual observance isn't necessarily the thing we're chasing for, but what we're trying to do is, can we come up with, and what this author would say is traditions that actually help us. So traditions are what humans have designed to apply the biblical principles to everyday life, but they're not actually commands from God.
[10:38] So in light of that, let me give you two for this week that you can try, two that I'm gonna give a shot at. And they're a little bit different. They're gonna adjust my rhythms a bit. And in addition to, if you were with us last week, in addition to those other two, and so the two this week to help us love God, to change our perspective on things each day: to go to the Scripture before you go to your device or your phone. And then number two, to try fasting. I wanna start by explaining fasting a little bit, and then we're gonna go back to number one. In both of these cases though, these are examples of habits of resistance, of trying to shore up what influences us just naturally through our own each and every day, just the natural occurrence of being human. There's things that kind of crash in around and reshape how we think of things.
[11:26] And if we just resist in these kind of two areas, it'll change our perspective. So if I can tell you about fasting, you know, if you, you've seen it maybe as like a health thing. It's kind of a health fad these days, you know, fasting, intermittent fasting, you know, fasting for extended period times, all of those kinds of things. But at the beginning, it actually has these incredible spiritual overtones and as a spiritual practice. And so at the very beginning of Jesus's ministry, in fact, He experiences and uses fasting as a means of actually preparing for His ministry. And in particular, to prepare for temptation. And fasting is the idea of taking away something from your rhythm and leaving space so that in that space you could experience and look to God more profoundly.
[12:17] So oftentimes fasting is about not eating for, say, a period of time, and to use that emptiness that comes to draw our attention back to God. And so for Jesus, this is what it looks like at the very beginning of His ministry: He gets baptized. And then immediately afterwards, we read this in Matthew 4. Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted there by the devil. For 40 days and 40 nights He fasted and became very hungry. Now we're advocating for maybe a 24-hour fast of something. For Jesus, 40 days and 40 nights in preparation for this moment, He drew close to His heavenly Father, and now had this experience where the devil came and tempted Him.
[13:06] Now, temptation is not something that any of us are immune to. We've all experienced that this is a part of the journey and we've succumbed to it time and time again. The interesting thing is when you get a chance to read this narrative and this story, the devil knows exactly how to tempt Jesus when he steps into the space with Him. He uses exactly where He was experiencing weakness in that moment. And this is the story as Jesus fasted in preparation for having this experience with the devil. This is what the devil does. He says, during that time, the devil came and said to Him, "If you are the Son of God," he's challenging Jesus's calling, setting Him up as if Jesus had to respond to the devil.
[13:54] "But if you are the Son of God," he says, "tell these stones to become loaves of bread," because the devil knows that Jesus is hungry, He's experiencing that, and the devil knows that Jesus has the power to do all things. And so in that moment, he offers this temptation. And Jesus expresses really the core part of our fasting experience in His response to the devil. In fact, He goes all the way back to the Old Testament and to the story of the Israelites, as they wandered in the wilderness for 40 years. God was writing a story of provision in their own life, reminding them that if they would simply follow Him, that He would provide for them each and every day in the most practical sense. And the practice of fasting is this reminder for all of us.
[14:42] And the reminder for you that if you could take a step back and recognize your need for something else and someone else to provide for you, that you can't actually do it on your own, that if you could feel and experience the hunger pain or the emptiness of whatever you step away from, you can use that to reorient and focus your thoughts on your heavenly Father, who is the one that provides all things. And so this is what happens. This is Jesus's response to the devil. He says, "No, the Scriptures say, 'People do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.'" This is going back, He's quoting Deuteronomy, He's quoting the story of the people of God, referencing and remembering that God is the one that we are dependent on.
[15:38] So for fasting, this is a chance for all of us and for you and for me to realize our need and our dependence on God. Through history, people have used fasting for all sorts of different things. But the important thing to note is that the variety gives us the ability to kind of shape it to our own journey and to our own experience. As Matthew Wilkins talks in his commentary on this particular passage, in a book on fasting generally, he says, "Various kinds of fasts were commonly practiced throughout much of Israel's history, always as a symbol of some deeper meaning than simply abstaining from food." So this is so much more than the benefit that comes from just not eating for a little bit. And in September, if you were around, we actually talked about there's a wide range of reasons and examples in the Scriptures of why people fasted.
[16:28] In fact, there's a number, and you won't, you don't have to look at these, you can't see all these. But you know, the fasting was to indicate and foster this kind of self-humiliation before God, often in connection with the confession of sins. And so for people to use fasting as a reminder that I'm dependent on God for so many things, including I can't deal with my sin on my own, this was a way that people did it. And another kind of category is some special petition. You would bring it to the Lord out of anguish, danger, desperation. And there's all these examples of when you have something so important that you want to pray to your heavenly Father for, you can use fasting as a means of making it a critical, important part. Now, Jesus actually talks about fasting throughout His ministry because it was this common practice.
[17:17] And so He gives instructions about fasting at the same time that He talks about other means of prayer and connecting with God. And this is what He says in Matthew 6, just a couple chapters later. He says, "When you fast," because when He was preaching, He assumes that anyone looking to connect with their heavenly Father was using this as a practice. He doesn't command it. And yet there's this expectation that those around Him would have been doing exactly this. However, He explains what fasting is meant to do for you and for me in this passage. He goes on to explain, it's not about us having an audience of ourselves or those around us. In fact, if we're gonna take any of these spiritual practices seriously, we have to make sure that our audience is our heavenly Father and our heavenly Father alone.
[18:06] In fact, as they would talk about the reward for fasting in particular in this instance, you can see that the reward for fasting in this next quote is the same as the reward for the other acts of righteousness: continued development of inner righteousness in this life, and the final perfection of righteousness in the afterlife. We work out ourselves and our internal story through the acts of fasting as a rhythm, as a habit. So if you wanna try it, this is kind of fun, let's give it a shot. I don't have a regular fasting practice. And so for me, I'm gonna try this and if you want to join with me, let's take a look at what we could do as a group if we were to fast together at some point during this week. So, fasting for beginners.
[18:51] First off, the first thing that you gotta do is you gotta pick something to fast from. For most people, food becomes the thing. If that's a big jump or you have a medical issue or, you know, that's just a high calling, you know, you fast from something that you're gonna feel emptiness from. So you can fast. Some people, through this season, we're in the season of Lent. So some people are fasting for the 40 days before Easter, some of them fast from caffeine, from sugar, from chocolate. Those are classic kind of ones. You can fast from social media, you can fast from all sorts of different things. The point is that you would choose something that you're gonna feel. It's like, "I'm gonna fast from broccoli." No, I mean, unless you eat a lot of broccoli, like, you gotta pick something that you're gonna really feel, you know, that you actually are typically engaging with.
[19:41] I actually really like broccoli, so it would be a challenge to fast from broccoli, but I don't know where that came from. Okay? So, pick something to fast from and your thing is gonna be for you. It doesn't need to match other people. and you don't even need to tell people in fact, what Jesus says is this isn't meant to be a competition in any way. It's meant to draw you closer to your heavenly Father. And so choose something that you can pull yourself away from. And that might, in that weakness and that lack, that it could actually provide you with an opportunity to connect deeper with your heavenly Father. That's the first thing. Okay? The second thing that you're gonna do is me suggesting, again, this is not the Bible talking, this is just an idea, to go sundown to sundown with a fast. If you choose a 24 hour, and the idea is each week try a 24 hour period where you would fast from something.
[20:31] And by going sundown to sundown, it changes a little bit of our perception. You see, usually we think of our days beginning at the very beginning of the morning. This is when the day starts, when I wake up. But as a practice, what happens when you start something and think about the day beginning in the evening is that then your day actually starts with your wind down and your rest. And there's this sense that happens internally where you recognize our world continues on and God's actually at work in profound ways while we are in our rest state. And so it's this subtle way of adjusting the way that you view even your rhythms in your daily life to see and recognize that things don't start when I wake up in the morning. Things have been going on and God's been at work in profound kind of ways.
[21:20] And so sundown to sundown just offers you a different kind of way of looking at a fast. Okay? Thirdly, lean into the lack, whatever the thing is. If it's food, you'll feel the lack of food. That's intentional. It's intentional to experience some kind of discomfort around the fasting experience. That's the point, that as you experience that emptiness, that it prompts you to recognize your own emptiness and your own dependence on God, and to use that experience, that feeling, that emotion, that pain, whatever it is, to, every time you catch it, to draw your attention back to your Heavenly Father. And that's exactly that, to replace the emptiness. And this is the fourth thing: to replace that emptiness with prayer.
[22:06] And for you, if there's something specific that you're praying for, you can use that as your time of prayer. If it's just a general sense of wanting to draw closer to God, then you do that through your fasting experience and just allow God to speak to you. You can open up even in the moments around your, if it's a lunchtime kind of thing, you're at work and now you're not actually eating. And so you've got this fresh space, don't just fill it, don't fill it. That would be pointless. Don't do that. Don't fill it with more meetings or emails or whatnot. Instead, take that moment, that time, and fill it with a walk on your own where you can pray, a closed door experience where you can focus on your Heavenly Father and just let Him reshape you. That's the point, and that's the opportunity that fasting brings us to. If you're fasting something else, you'll find where that lack and that emptiness is.
[22:52] But this is something that you should try because for thousands of years, the people following after God have used this practice as a means of drawing close to Him. And for us today, more than ever, we have so much abundance in our life that we have to force ourselves. We have to step away. We have to remind ourselves of our dependence on God. And this is a practice that we can do that with. Okay, so that's fasting. So if you wanna join me fasting, that's the number two one. Let's look at our list again, let's go back. We got fasting. That's a weekly practice. Try it once a week, 24 hours. Now, Scripture before phone. The idea here is that oftentimes our phones, and, but if this is not you, you'll have to figure out what this example is in your own world. Our phone is where we go to instinctively first thing in the morning.
[23:41] And when we're in need of just a little bit of a break or a disconnect. And what ends up happening is our phone ends up being the thing that shapes our day, especially if it's the first thing that we go to and changes our perception on our world around us. And so the principle here is, instead of using your phone and the apps, your games or your social media, or your email as the thing that you start your day with, could you start your day with the Scriptures and the truth of God's Word? Because that will change your perception of yourself, and it will change your perception of God and all of those around you as well. And so for you, whatever that means, I mean, your rhythms in the morning could be different. You know, the best time for this kind of principle might be at a different point in the day.
[24:28] The point is, can we use the Scriptures to be the thing that we frame our life around and that allow us to have a fresh lens on how we view our time and our days? And what happens is it just adjusts even so slightly, even when you're doing good important work. It can be difficult to recognize and know how God has actually called you to something fairly specific. And there's this example from Mother Teresa's ministry where she was interacting with a coworker in the ministry who was getting frustrated. He was doing good work, he was doing work with lepers, this ministry of looking after in some ways the least of these. And he was frustrated with his supervisor because his supervisor was seemingly putting these barriers in place. So his ministry was being hindered with the lepers.
[25:15] And so he comes to Mother Teresa with this frustration, and he laments to her. And this is the quote I wanna read you. He laments, "My vocation. This is what I'm here for, is to work for these lepers." And Mother Teresa replied gently, "Brother, your vocation is not to work for lepers. Your vocation is to belong to Jesus." And this is our vocation. This is your vocation, to belong to Jesus. And so is there a way that your day, is there a habit that you could put in place so that you could be reminded every single moment that you belong to Jesus?
[26:05] And that this day is made not for all the things you've got on your schedule, but it's made for us to belong to Him and to look and to serve Him. Now through the good things, you should continue to look after lepers, although there's not as many these days, so you'll find other vocations. You've got a vocation, you don't need a new vocation. The point is that your vocation at its core is different than what you think it is sometimes. And so we use these things, this idea, this practice, this habit to change our perspective and our minds. And this goes to the core of what the Scriptures, the Christian scriptures are actually all about. In fact, they talk about themselves, they self-reference. When you open the Bible, it's a collection of all of these different literary devices.
[26:53] And I mean, there's letters and there's biographies and there's psalms, there's songs, and, but it all comes together in this package that we see. And there's, it's so complex, and yet it speaks about itself because the, when we open these words, we as Christians, as those that gather in this kind of way, we think that these words are words that God is speaking to us. And the author of Hebrews, this, this epistle later in the New Testament is explaining what this actually means for us. And if you've been a Christian, you've read the Scriptures for any length of time, you've experienced this that I'm gonna explain in just a moment. But if you're on the fringe of faith, if you're not quite sure why we so care deeply about this book, it has profound, not just truth in it, but it has truth that cuts to you and to your core and changes who you are.
[27:43] And this is what the writer of Hebrews is saying when he says, or she says, we don't actually know who wrote it, "For the word of God is alive and powerful. It's sharper than the sharpest two-edged sword, cutting between soul and spirit, between joint and marrow. It exposes our innermost thoughts and our desires." And this is our experience that as we open the Scriptures that actually cuts into our core. It's not separating for the sake of trying to disjoint these two things. What it's explaining is that it cuts to our innermost being and reads us in ways that over time reshape us. And this is your experience. If you've been a reader of God's Word for any length of time, it does something inside of you as you come back to it time and time again.
[28:30] The writer continues on in explaining this. He says, "Nothing in all creation is hidden from God. Everything is naked and exposed before His eyes. And He is the one to whom we are accountable." And this is our experience when we open the Scriptures that our own souls are laid naked before God. He can see all things and He knows our thoughts even before we go there. But when we come to Him, that's when we start to recognize that truth and how it changes us. And so what Gordon McDonald says in forging this real life faith in this world today says, "The forging of a real world faith means not only that one follows Christ into the heavenlies to meet God, which is often what we think, right? We want to experience God in like a profound way. We want a spiritual encounter." And those are good things.
[29:17] That's an important part of our journey. But he says that one follows Christ into the corridors of one's inner space, which is terrifying. I don't know about your inner space, but my inner space and inner thoughts is absolutely terrifying. Like if you could see what goes on in my mind, like it's challenging and it's embarrassing sometimes and it's frustrating and I wish I had more control and I wish I could see things differently and I wish I believe like all of that kinda stuff just rattles around. And if it happens for you too, the idea that Christ would come into those inner quarters of our inner space, but for the purpose of developing this spirit of Christlikeness, He wants to change us. And so we come to the Scriptures because this is the promise of what the Scriptures will do for us and for you.
[30:06] And so before you prioritize something else, whether it be the app in the morning, whether it be the device or the show, whatever it is, would you start instead with the truth of God's Word? Now for me, I need a reminder of that. Like even just saying it here and knowing that I'll have to report back next week isn't enough. Like I need something. So for me, it's gonna be a reminder on my phone that's gonna ding me. I also created a couple of lock screens, 'cause my phone again will be the thing that I pull and I need something that will kind of like spark me. So I made a few, you can have them if you want. I give them to you really easily. This was my first one. I thought it was kind of cool. So, Bible before phone. Start every day with the truth. I thought that was kind of fun. And then I thought, like some days I'm gonna need something a little bit edgier.
[30:52] So this is my second one. Read the Bible now on my phone. Really clear. And then I was getting a little bit cheeky with myself last night. And so this is my all-time favorite: Read your Bible, ya sinner, which is currently what's on my phone and will probably be the one that I need for this week. If you want these lock screens for your phone, you can make them yourself obviously. But if you scan this QR code at any point, you can certainly download them as well as a reminder that, hey, could we be the kinds of people that frame our days around the truth of God's Word? Okay, so this week, if you wanna join me in this journey on your way out at both of the exits, you'll see we have like tables of dominoes. If you got one last week, you can just use the same domino.
[31:38] Those ones aren't any different or any more special. The point is if you need a tool that kind of sparks your imagination for these things, you can grab that and hold onto it and take the journey. I'm gonna continue to try to turn my phone off for an hour each day to curate my media and then for this week to start my day with the Scriptures and then to find a 24 hour period where I can fast. And I think you should try those things too because I think it will reshape and change you. And I think it will help you discover what it means to love and to follow God in a deeper and more profound way. Lemme pray for us. Lemme pray for you. Lemme pray for our weeks. Heavenly Father, these things are not complex.
[32:25] They're not difficult in some ways, and yet they can be so profound for us. And I know in my own journey, I'm fraught with all sorts of embarrassment around my journey of 30 years wanting to follow after You and the ways that I failed and the ways that I've come short and the ways that I've not lived into the life that You've called me to. And so, Heavenly Father, I pray that even in this room, as we think about something as simple as these things, we know the devil will come in the same way that he would tempt Jesus with exactly the thing that would've been monumentally tempting in that moment, that he'll tempt us with shame. Even in these moments, he'll come and he'll speak into our lives and to say, "Ah, you failed so much in this, why bother again?"
[33:13] And Heavenly Father, we are so grateful that in a place like this, that You have just so much grace for us and You would just rather and rather experience our love and community, communing with You. And so give us a sense of Your presence. God, give us a sense of Your desire for us and desire to be in community with us and, and give us a sense of Your power that we could do these kinds of things. Not because the things are the thing, but because You are our God. And by fixing our eyes on You, everything changes. And for those that are hesitant and not sure about who You are and about what that means to follow after You, God, I pray that You would meet them in their attempts, in their meager ideas of maybe giving this a shot.
[34:03] And I pray that You would be so profoundly present with us that we couldn't help but speak about what You are doing in our lives because of the ways that You are gonna work through our simple habits and practices this week. And so, God, would You go and empower each and every one of us to love You more and to love others more. This week, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.