Sermons by Steve Goldberg

11 years ago, I revealed to my wife that I had been having an affair for a year and a half. She calmly responded, I love you. We can make it through this. Today we're going to be talking about marriage. My name is Steve Goldberg. I'm the worship pastor here at Grace Raleigh, and it's an honor to bring the third message in our series, I Want a Better Life, entitled I Want a Better Marriage. For those of you who are first-time guests with us today, or maybe you're not familiar with my story. Surprise! In addition to being the worship pastor here at Grace, my wife and I also started a non-profit called Side-by-Side Ministry about five years ago, where we share our testimony, our story, our journey from hurt to hope. And it's our mission to inspire and encourage hurting couples to value, nurture, and restore their marriages. Now, to give you a little background, when my wife and I got married, neither one of us was following our childhood religions. I was raised Jewish in Massachusetts, hence the name Goldberg. My wife was raised Lutheran in Wisconsin. Both of us came from broken homes. Lisa's parents divorced when she was two years old. My parents divorced when I was three years old. We did not have good role models for marriage in our lives. And so for me, I just thought that marriage was kind of the next stage in the relationship. And if it worked out, great. If it didn't, well, okay. So it's no surprise that when our marriage started deteriorating after the first few years, I wasn't all that committed. During that time, there was a big void in our marriage. Lisa chose to fill that void by going back to church. She joined an in-depth Bible study. She surrounded herself with Christian women. She rededicated her life to Christ. I, on the other hand, decided to spend as much time away from my marriage and my wife as possible. I filled my life with my friends, my band, and ended up having an affair for a year and a half. During that time when our marriage was not going well at all, before the reveal of my affair, we took a trip to Mexico. Now, to be a little bit more forthright, my wife actually begged me to go to Mexico. I did not want to go. Our friends were getting married at a destination wedding there, and I didn't want to do it. But she begged me, and I said, you know what? Okay, fine. I'll go. So here's a picture from that trip. Now, side note, this was taken a long time ago, okay? I mean, look at that hair. I mean, you know, like, look at the smiles there. Like, this was taken with a digital camera, like a legit digital camera. Like, I'm not saying that we invented the selfie, but like, we were definitely early promoters of it. So, you know, a little credit. So, but this trip was tough. It was very stressful for us. You would never know that this couple in this picture was barely talking to each other, and that in less than six months' time, they would be separated. The truth is that when you look at this picture, it reminds me that not everything is as it seems. And I'd be willing to bet that behind the smiles and the small talk here this morning, there are hurting marriages. Divorce is very common in our society. We know the statistic, half of all marriages end in divorce. People don't have the, they don't put the importance on marriage anymore. It's very much an individualistic society about your own happiness, your own pleasure. But the truth is, is that the fastest growing demographic of divorce is empty nesters, which is shocking. These people have spent their whole marriages, 20, 30 years, focusing on things other than each other. Maybe it's the kids, maybe it's the career, maybe it's something else. And when they get to the point where the kids are out of the house, they say, who are you? They don't have that connection anymore. You know, when Lisa and I went to a marriage intensive, it was run by a Christian ministry called Retrovive, went to this marriage intensive shortly after the reveal of the affair. We were shocked that we were among the youngest people there. Most of the people were in their 50s and 60s. In fact, check this out. There was one couple there that actually, this guy, this guy brought the divorce papers with him to the marriage intensive. And I can only figure that he was like, well, this way I can say I've tried everything, okay? But at the end of the intensive, we rejoiced with them as they tore up the divorce papers. It was an amazing moment, God working through that marriage. But sadly, that's not the case for all marriages. One of the things that we learned during this intensive was that there are four stages of a relationship. This was eye-opening for me. It's been eye-opening for couples that we've talked to over the years, and I think it'll be eye-opening for you today. In a relationship, there are four stages. The first stage is called romance. This otherwise known as the attraction stage, or my personal favorite, the euphoric stage. Okay, you know this stage. This is the stage where you meet someone, you fall in love, everything is perfect. I mean, the birds are singing, the sun's out. You know, this person can't do anything wrong. You can't wait to see them. You have butterflies in your stomach every time you think of them. When Lisa and I met, I was living in Boston, she was living in New York at the time. We met in Orlando at a wedding that was kind of like an extended vacation. I mean, most of the people in our age bracket that went down to this wedding stayed there for three, four days. I will never forget, on the first day, I walked into the room, and there she was, Lisa, right over here. And I remember when I saw her, my stomach sank. I mean, I think I lost my breath. My eyes opened. I just said, wow. Her recount of the situation is a little bit different, but you'll have to ask her about that. We know this stage. We know this stage. This is when you fall in love. This is great. During that stage, there are special hormones, chemicals that are released in our bodies that only happens during that time of that relationship. It will never happen again. And it only lasts for about 18 months to two years. The next stage of marriage, disillusionment. Disillusionment. This got sad quick, didn't it? Disillusionment. This is when our eyes are opened. It's like, wait a second, who is this person? All the things that were cute aren't necessarily cute anymore, right? They start to get on your nerves a little bit. All those things your parents were telling you the whole time, you're just like, oh, okay, I get it. This is disillusionment. Sadly, lots of relationships end in this stage. They're missing that euphoric part of the relationship. It ends. My buddy Dane Joneshill, he's a brilliant songwriter. He wrote a song called We Lie Together about a couple in this stage. And listen to these lyrics. It used to be you thought my faults were funny. We'd laugh at how forgetful I could be. But the last time I forgot about your birthday, you lost the humor for that sort of thing. Sad. That's a couple in the disillusionment stage. If the couple stays together, they move on to misery. The misery stage, also known as the numbness stage. Now, this stage can last a very short time, or it can last years. This is the stage where the couple, where the marriage, is basically like a partnership. Kind of two ships in the night, roommates together. There's no real intimacy in the relationship anymore. In fact, a lot of people say that it's in this stage that they're not sure whether it's better to get a divorce or to stay married. But a lot of people choose on their own convictions to stay married, stick it out until the kids are out of school. Hence the rise in divorce among empty nesters. In this stage, it's very common for people to try to escape their marriage. They can escape their marriage in all kinds of ways. They can focus more on work, focus on the kids, their family, drugs, drinking, gambling. I mean, really, house projects. I had a neighbor once who would do house projects. I mean, like you've never seen. This guy was constantly working on his house. It was exhausting watching him avoid his wife. But listen, this is the stage. It's a fertile ground for affairs to happen. Because what happens when you're in that misery stage or numbness stage? You have no connection with your spouse or very little connection at all. And somebody else comes into the picture. You have that spark again. Remember the euphoric phase, those chemical reactions that only happen with somebody, with that relationship once, that happens. And then all of a sudden we're blinded. We think that, oh, this is the one. This is the one I should be married with. I feel happy again. Affairs can happen. That's what happened to me. And just so we're clear about affairs, an affair doesn't have to be physical. An affair occurs whenever a person other than your spouse is fulfilling a marital need or duty. So affairs can be emotional as well. In fact, I would argue that they're just as common, if not more common, and just as damaging as physical affairs. Sounds pretty bad so far, doesn't it? Well, the next stage, this is the goal to get to. This is the awakening stage. This is when our eyes are open to the reality of what a long-term relationship in marriage looks like. This is the stage when true intimacy and depth can occur. This is the stage when love changes from being just a feeling to being an action and a choice. But listen, no matter what stage your marriage is in, there's good news. It can be better. No matter what stage your marriage is in, it can be better. A marriage is better with God at the center. A marriage is better with God at the center. A marriage is better with God at the center. So if we're going to look at marriage with God at the center, I think it's a good idea that we open up the Bible and take a look at that. If you have a Bible, take it out. We're going to be starting in Genesis 2. If you don't have a Bible, there's probably one on your device, on your phone. You can pull that up. If you'd like to grab the Bible in front of you, there's one in the seat back pocket. Listen, if you don't have a paper Bible at home, take this Bible with you. It's our gift to you. We believe that every home should have a legitimate Bible. Okay. Genesis 2. So God has just created the world, everything in it, right? The heavens, the earth. He's created the oceans, the land, the animals. As our four-year-old Ford said in the Christmas video, the two little donkeys and that big bird. Okay? He's created everything. All right. But he hasn't created a woman yet. So in verse 18, he says, Now before we get caught up on the word helper, a more accurate translation would be companion. I just want to make it, put it out there that in God's eyes, man, woman, completely equal in God's eyes, of equal value. Now in a marriage, we have different strengths, different weaknesses, both of us in different roles. But as far as having value in God's eyes and in the marriage, equally valuable. So God makes a woman. He puts Adam to sleep, makes Eve, and I can picture it, right? Like if this were a movie that we're jumping down to verse 29. If this were a movie, I could see Adam opening his eyes. The song At Last by Etta James is rolling in the background. He his partner for the first time. He's excited. He's excited about this. Of course, this is before the fall. They were naked and unashamed, so that probably helped as well. It goes on to say, therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife. They shall become one flesh. Now, when this was written, the term shall leave his father and mother, I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. Because at the time, families would have family businesses. And so a son who is of marrying age would be married, and they would go live and work on the family business, whether a farmer or something else. So really what this is saying here is that the man shall prioritize his spouse. Prioritize. So the first thing, if we want a God-centered marriage, prioritize your spouse. This is something that I struggled with early on, especially in our marriage, but continue to struggle with it. I would prioritize my parents over my wife. I wouldn't even know I was doing it. My wife knew, but I did not know that I was doing it. But it's important to prioritize your spouse over your parents. This can be incredibly hard for younger people. They've just grown up in the house with their parents. Their parents have been the ones guiding them, leading them, telling them right from wrong, supporting them. And then all of a sudden, they're on a team with someone their own age who barely knows as much as they do. And they're supposed to be the team, the unit together. It's hard. It's hard to prioritize your spouse. But it's a good thing to do if you want a God-centered marriage. I had a friend once who was telling me about how when she was newly married in her younger 20s, she sat down at the table with her new husband and her father, and her father said, let's say your new husband and I have a disagreement. Whose side are you going to be on? And she said, well, my husband's. He said, good. And he said, okay, let's say your husband and I have a disagreement and you know I'm right. Now whose side are you on? And she grabbed her husband's hand and said, my husband's. You guys are a team. You're a unit together. If you want a God-centered marriage, you need to love your spouse. Love your spouse. If we want to know what love looks like, we're its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. If you want a God-centered marriage, you need to love your spouse unconditionally. During the time when our marriage was in a really dark place, I was leading a secret life. Lisa had gone back to church. She loved me unconditionally. And it's funny sometimes when we talk to couples and we say, okay, you know, you guys got to try. You got to, you know, put in your best. You got to love them as if they're doing the right things. And somebody, one of the people will say, all right, I'll do everything I can for six months. That's a condition. You're putting a condition on your love. God loves us unconditionally. Now, I should mention, or I want to mention, that abuse has no business being in marriage at all. If you're in an abusive relationship, seek professional help and guidance and get to a safe place. There's no reason that abuse should be there. If you want to have a God-centered marriage, you need to serve your spouse. Serve your can be a tough thing to do. Aaron Keyes, who's the founder of the 10,000 Fathers Worship School that I attended, has a great quote. And he says, everyone loves being a servant until they're treated like one. And it's true. Everyone loves being a servant until they're treated like one. Servants are not treated well. Jesus is washing feet. Like, do you know how nasty feet were? Like, they're nasty now. Like, think about how nasty they were like back then. Like, disgusting. Dirt, grime, everything on their feet. So to wash someone's feet was really a humbling thing. And for Jesus, our Lord and Savior, to do it, set a good example. While I was being terrible to my wife during that time, she would serve me by literally choosing to wake up early in the morning and make me an omelet before work, which is not the sort of thing that she would necessarily do earlier in our marriage. If you want a God-centered marriage, you need to forgive your spouse. Forgive your spouse. Ephesians 4, verse 32. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you. If you fully understand the amount of what you've been forgiven of, you need to turn around and do that to your spouse. And it's a constant thing, forgiveness. It's not a one-time thing. I felt forgiveness almost immediately or a part of it when my wife said, I love you, we can make it through this. I later went to church with her and three months later gave my life to Christ. We have a thing in our home that helps us is that we actually ask for each other's forgiveness. Not just say, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. But we say, will you forgive me? If you want a God-centered marriage, you need to forgive your spouse. And the last one on the list here, if you want a God-centered marriage, you need to grow with your spouse. Grow with your spouse. 1 Thessalonians 5.11. not tend to it, and expect great results. Nobody would build a house, never maintain it, and expect it to stay in new condition. Just like a garden or a house, we need to constantly work on our marriages and grow in our marriages. If you notice at all there today, I did not mention a passage in Ephesians, which is Ephesians 5, which is the longest passage of Scripture on marriage in the Bible. The reason I didn't mention it today is because my wife and I are starting a marriage small group here at Grace. We're starting on February 9th, and four o'clock in the afternoon, childcare provided, and it's free to attend, the more the merrier. That study that we're going to do is called Love and Respect. We've gone through it four times. We've taught it once, and it's been incredibly beneficial each time. And so I have a little promo for you or significant other, you feel unloved at that moment or disrespected. 83% of the men say they feel disrespected. 72% of the women say they feel unloved. Now, it's very important that I say this. We all need love and respect equally. But the felt need during conflict is as different as pink is from blue, night is from day, male is from female. If you were to ask us to pinpoint one moment where your relationship with one another did a 180, it's absolutely when we did the love and respect. If we knew ahead of time that there was something available like this, it would have made those first 12, 13 years of our marriage so much smoother I think. a workbook for you. The workbook provides additional information that will enable you to apply this simple message. We include discussion questions, stories to read and discuss. There's a couple called Missy and Stu. A devotional for each session and then there's the pertinent information that will be available to you for quick review and reference. Love and Respect really gives you a lot of insight into this is what men think and this is what women think and this is how they thrive. And that perspective had never been explained to us before, especially in such a comical and easy to understand way. It took a biblical approach to a lot of problems that we have. And when you can apply the Bible to marital problems, it always helps. You get a chance to learn how you think as a male and how your spouse thinks as a female and to understand that those differences in thinking are just that. It's not wrong or right, it's just different. It really helped us to decode who we're married to and that's something that I want to share with everybody. They're gonna give you you the tools. They're going to give you what you need. Now what you do with it is up to you. You can walk out the door and you can throw it all away if you want to, or you can take it and you can make it become a part of who you are and begin to have the marriage that you deserve and the marriage that God wants you to have. The last time we led this study, there were 80 people that showed up to it at our last church. There were some young, some old, some newly married, some that were in hurting situations, but most of the people that came to it were in this awakening stage. The thing is, is that those people knew that it's a strength to work on your marriage, not a weakness. It shows strength, not weakness. So as we close up today, we've been talking about marriage is better with God at the center. Marriage is better with God at the center. One last thought. Make no mistake. God doesn't exist to make your marriage good. Your marriage exists to express the goodness of God. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, what an honor it is to be here today to speak about marriage. God, I'm living proof of how miraculous your love is, how you can change us, how the old is gone and the new has come with Jesus at the center of our lives. God, I pray especially for all the marriages here today. Lord, come into them in a powerful way. And God, let us see our spouses as beautiful as you see us. We pray all of this in the matchless name of Jesus. Amen.

Good morning. My name is Steve Goldberg. I'm the worship pastor here at Grace Raleigh. And I just got to be up front with you first and foremost. It's been a little while since I've done something like this, since I've talked in front of a congregation like this. In fact, I think we have a picture of the last time I did it. That's me on the right. Okay, that was my bar mitzvah. That was several years ago. And a few things have changed since then, so I'm trying to adapt with that. So last week, Nate brought the first installment in our series of best practices. He talked about reading the Bible. And I don't know about you, but I felt convicted about that. And I, even as a pastor, do not spend as much time in the Bible as I think that I should. And I dedicated more time this week in the Bible, and I feel extremely blessed because of that. I've also heard that many of you are doing the same thing and that it's a blessing as well. I would like to encourage you to keep going with that, to keep on. And if those of you that haven't jumped in yet, it's not too late to start reading your Bible. Jump in, start today. I'm sure it will be a blessing in your lives. So a few months ago when we were talking about this series on best practices, Nate said to me, Steve, we're going to be doing one on worship. And as the worship pastor at Grace, I would like you to take that one. And I immediately said, oh, this is great. This is great. This is what I do. This is going to be so easy. This is low-hanging fruit. I've wanted to share with you for a long time. I really only get about a minute or so during each service each Sunday, so I get to share everything that I want to about worship. So I sat down, and I started putting my thoughts together, started doing some research, looking in the Bible, looking in my textbooks, and I quickly realized that if I were to share everything that I want to share with you guys about worship, we would easily be here for half the day. So we're not going to do that today. I can see all the... Okay, good. No, we're not going to do that today. What we're going to do today is just focus on what I think would be a good starting point on worship, and that is to talk about authentic worship. So we're going to be talking about authentic worship today. So when I was 12 years old, my uncle made me a tape. He dubbed it. Do you remember how to do that with the buttons and the this and then you undo it? Yeah. Okay. So he made me a tape of Jimi Hendrix live at Monterey. And if you're not familiar with this concert, this is the one where he hit the scene and he lit his guitar on fire, okay? So 12-year-old Steve hearing this for the first time, I could not believe what I was hearing. I immediately, immediately ran down to the garage. I grabbed my wiffle ball bat. I grabbed some string. I grabbed some tape. I ran back up to my room. I put the string on the bat. I put on the bat. I put on sunglasses, my best Hard Rock Cafe shirt, and I pretended to be Jimi Hendrix in the mirror. I had to be a part of it. Music has that way of affecting us deeply. Music goes into us. It affects us. Have you ever seen people who have Alzheimer's or maybe dementia, that they're living in another reality, and then somebody plays Amazing Grace or Just As I Am for them, and they have this moment of clarity, and they can sing every word and every note. This is how music affects us. The first time that I went to church with my wife, for those of you who don't know, we were separated at one point. We were heading toward divorce. We started going to church together. It was the music, when I walked in, the music that broke down those walls that I could hear the good news of Jesus. This is the effect that music has on us. But is all music worship? No. Is God looking just for music? No. He's looking for worship. So we're going to be talking about worship today. But worship is kind of a broad term. We can worship all kinds of things. We can worship God. That's good. We can worship other gods. Not so good. We can worship the universe, nature, our finances, our careers, our spouses, our children. So today I thought it would be good to kind of hone in on what we're talking about. We're going to be talking about authentic worship in the church, corporate worship. And so I have a definition for us that worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and hearts. So worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, bodies, and hearts. Did you know that praise and worship is mentioned over 400 times in the Bible? That we're commanded to worship over 50 times in the Bible? So anything that's mentioned that much in the Bible I think deserves for us to take a look at. So first of all, we want to look at why we don't praise the Lord with our breath, Psalm 98 says that the rocks will cry out and the rivers will clap their hands. Now we live close enough to the mountains here in Raleigh. Have you ever been next to a river and listened to the sound of that? Does it not sound like applause? And the rivers clap their hands for God. All of creation praises God. The next time that you're walking along a river, maybe taking a hike, take a moment and worship God right there. Not only did he create worship here, he created it in heaven. You understand? All of this goes away. But not worship. Worship is our primary activity in heaven. So he created it. Also, he is worthy of it. He is worthy of worship. Great is the Lord, most worthy of praise. His greatness no one can fathom. That's Psalm 145. He's the only one worthy of worship. Now, we sometimes get that wrong. We sometimes misstep. We sometimes put things ahead of God when maybe we shouldn't. If you do that, listen, you're not alone. John, we just did a series in John. He wrote the Gospel of John. He also wrote some letters and Revelation. John, in Revelation, And you know that this is true. And why do we know it's true? He wrote the book. He could have left that part out, but he didn't. He chose to keep it in there so that we can know that we're not alone in this. He's also present in worship. What did we talk about earlier for our definition? Worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and our hearts. He's present in worship. This is something that I think we kind of take for granted nowadays, that he's present in worship, okay? Before Christ, to be in the presence of God was not a common thing. Before Christ, God dwelled in the Holy of Holies. Now, you have to understand that in Israel, there was the temple. Most people could not go into the inner part of the temple, the holy place. They were on the outskirts. They could not even be close to the presence of God there. Then, within that holy place, there was something called the Holy of Holies. And that's where the Ark of the Covenant was. The only person, there was only one person that could go in there. That was the high priest. Only one person could go into the presence of God, and that only happened once a year on the Day of Atonement, on Yom Kippur. Once a year, one person could be in the presence of God. Okay? And let me give you an idea of how serious they were about this. They were so serious that they would tie a rope around him when he went in so that in case he died while in there, they could pull him out. That's pretty amazing. I mean, the fact that that's how serious it was to be in the presence of God. Now, through Jesus, we're able to be in the presence of God. He says that wherever two or more are gathered in his name, he is present. So how do we do this? Well, worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and our hearts. So with our voices, we can sing. The Lord is my strength and my shield. In him my heart trusts and I am helped. My heart exalts and with my song I give thanks to him. That's Psalm 28. We know this. There's time dedicated in our service to this. There are billboard charts called praise and worship. Singing connects us to God. It connects our hearts to our minds. In fact, praise is mentioned in multiple ways, this singing in the Old and New Testaments. We have tehillah, to praise vocally in song or shouts. Hallelujah, you might be familiar with. This is a shouting call for corporate praise. We have tada, which is to sing praises together as one community in harmony. This is what we do when we gather each week in worship. So we worship God in his presence with our voices and with our bodies also. We see this multiple times. Now I'm going to say a few verses here. I just want you to know that I'm not making this stuff up. I mean, this stuff is in the Bible as worthy offerings to God. I mean, this is acceptable worship to God. You can bow your head to God. The man bowed his head and worshiped the Lord, Genesis 24. You can lift your hands. So I will bless you as long as I live. In your name I will lift my hand, Psalm 63. This word is yadah, to lift or throw arms upward in praise and surrender. A similar one to this is spreading out your hands, like this. This is sabah, to reach out with affection to God, to feel his hold on us. This is almost like you're reaching out for a hug from God. This is I need you, God. Bowing your knee. praising God. We're getting excited about God. Clap your hands, all people. Shout to God with loud songs of joy. Psalm 47. Here's one of my personal favorites. Falling on your face before the Lord. Leviticus 9. And fire came out from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offerings and the pieces of fat on the altar.. If you put your envelope in there, and the Lord's fire came and consumed it, I think we'd all shout and hit the floor, right? And you know what? We would be worshiping. Okay, dancing. Uh-oh. Dancing. Okay. And David danced before the Lord with all his might, and David was wearing a linen ephod. This is 2 Samuel 6. David is king of Israel. He's returning with the Ark of the Covenant to put it in the Holy of Holies. He's built a tabernacle for it. He's super excited. And how excited is he? He rips off his clothes and basically dances in his underwear through the streets. And I think we have a video of this. Anybody catch who that was? Richard Gere? You should go find that on Netflix. So what he's doing is halal. This is to boast foolishly, to make a show of it. But what do we see there, right? So he's dancing through the streets. He doesn't have his clothes on. Everybody's cheering and shouting, right? But what else did we see? We saw his wife looking out the window, right? Okay, and this is actually, ouch, right? Right? But David retorted to Michal, I was dancing before the Lord who chose me above your father and all his family. He appointed me as the leader of Israel, the people of the Lord. So I celebrate before the Lord. And then he goes one step further. Yes, I am willing to look even more foolish than this, even to be humiliated in my own eyes. But those servant girls who you mentioned will indeed think I am distinguished. He was dancing with abandonment before the Lord. How often have we been in this place? I'm sure we've all been there at some point in our lives where we've done something maybe vulnerable or something that we believed in or just put ourselves out there and people criticize that. They look down on us for it. It's happened to all of us. It's not a good feeling. On the other side of things, how often are we the Michal in that story where we look at someone and go, why are they doing that? Why are they acting that way? Maybe don't they know that we don't do that here? It's easy to see ourselves in both situations here. So we talked about worship is the activity of praising, worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and our hearts. This is the authentic part I want to talk about. We worship with our hearts. It's good for us to worship. God created us to delight in him. We experience this delight a great deal in worship. In fact, Psalm 92 says, it is good to give thanks to, a few years ago, I was at a worship conference in Orlando. And it was one of the big conferences that they do every year. There are about 1,500 worship leaders there. And all the popular worship artists were there too. So we had like Hillsong and Bethel, Phil Wickham, Chris Tomlin, Elevation. I mean, it's a lot of the songs that we do here, those artists were there. And the times of worship were very powerful. I mean, they know how to usher you into the presence of God. And it was powerful. But at one point during the conference, the power went out. And everybody in the room, all 1,500 of us laughed first because, you know, we're all in worship ministry. It's like, ha, ha, ha, like we're elbowing each other. Like, it even happens to them. You know, look at them squirm. And so we were laughing. And then we see all the people dressed in all black coming, like running around the stage and everything with their flashlights trying to figure out what the problem is. And when it was obvious that the power wasn't going to just come back on, we kind of settled down a little bit. And out of the front of the room, there were maybe eight people or so, started singing, How Great Thou Art. We sang that this morning. Worship doesn't need the lights and the sound and all the stuff. Worship is about our voices, our bodies, and our hearts in God's presence. They started singing. It started rippling out as the verse was going. Everybody knows this song. We're all worship leaders. There's 1,500 of us singing relatively well in harmony. Okay? This moment was amazing. I'm singing my heart out. It gets to everybody singing and worshiping. The room is erupting in worship. We get to the chorus, and I go to sing, and nothing comes out. Nothing comes out. I'm so overwhelmed by what's happening that I fall to my knees and just lift my hands and try to whisper the words. I had never heard anything so beautiful, and I don't think I ever will until I get to heaven. That really was, I believe, a taste of what heaven is going to sound like. It's not going to sound like acoustic guitars and drums. It's going to sound like God's created people worshiping with our breath. This was authentic worship. So our authentic worship here is going to be us. It's not going to be what the church down the street is doing. If we copy what the church down the street is doing, it's not authentic, right? If we copy what they're doing online at megachurches and see how they're worshiping, it's not going to be authentic, because authentic worship comes from the heart. So we need to worship authentically like Grace Raleigh. We need to worship authentically like Grace Raleigh. Now, also, feeling something in your heart. Did you notice something in all this worship that I mentioned in the Bible that it's all actions? It's all things that you feel in your heart and you do. So authentic worship isn't going to be feeling something in your heart and not doing anything about it. That's not authentic either. Authentic worship is feeling it in your heart and expressing it. But are we going to look like the church down the street? No, we're not. We're going to look like us. So, we are going to have a time of worship here at the end of our service. And let me just tell you, as we go into that time, you know, grace is a very unique church, I think. Grace has been through a lot over the years. Grace is full of people who love each other. I will say that most people who come here for the first time, one of the first comments that they have is how much a family it feels like here, how friendly people are, how included they feel. What I'm trying to say is that this is a safe place. This is a place where family can be family with each other. If you are feeling a way to express yourself, let's not be the Michals in the story and say, what are they doing? We don't do that here. And listen, I know that it's going to look different. It's going to look different. It's going to look like us. And all that we want as a church is to worship God with all of our hearts. So I'd like to ask you all to stand and join me as we pray together. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day. We thank you that we get the opportunity to glorify you in your presence. What an amazing thing it is that we can come into your presence and use the breath that you have given to us to just give back to you. Lord, we know that you work deeply in us, that you love us, that you knew us before we were born, that you know every hair on our heads. So Lord, we ask that that love just come through us now in a powerful way. And we pray all of this in Jesus' name. Amen. Let's worship together. You give life, You are love, You bring light to the darkness. You give hope, You restore every heart that is broken and great are you lord it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praise it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only you give life, You are love, You bring light to the darkness. You give hope, You restore every heart that is broken and great are you lord it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praises your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only is your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praises your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only he's so good and worthy of our praise. Let it pour out of you. will shout your praise our hearts will cry these bones will sing great are you lord and all the earth will shout your praise our hearts will cry these bones will sing pray are you lord and all the earth will shout your praise our Our hearts will cry. These bones will sing. Hey, are you Lord? It's your breath in our lungs. So we pour out our praise. We pour out our praise we pour out our praises your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praise. We pour out our praise. It's your breath. In our lives. So we pour out our praise to you only. What a gift it is to be able to praise God freely and openly. And we can only do that because he allows us to. He created us to worship him and to glorify him. And he does that because he loves us. He is jealous of me. Love's like a hurricane. I am a tree bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy. When all of a sudden I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory And I realize just how beautiful you are How great your affections are for me And oh, how He loves us all. Oh, how He loves us. How He loves us all. He is jealous of me, loves like a hurricane. I am a tree bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy. When all of a sudden I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory And I realize just how beautiful you are and how great your affections are for me And oh, how He loves us all. Oh, how He loves us. How He loves us Oh, how He loves us Oh are his portion and he is our prize drawn to redemption by the grace in his eyes if his grace is an ocean we're all sinking and heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss and my heart turns violently inside of my chest I don't have time to maintain these regrets when I think about the way that he loves us oh how he loves us oh how he loves us Oh Oh how He loves us Oh how He loves us Oh how He loves Oh Oh, how He loves us. Oh, how He loves us. Oh, how He loves.