(This transcript was generated by AI. Apologies for any inacuracies)

Hosanna.

Palm Sunday.

I'll show you how cool God is.

I knew I was preaching this week to give Clay kind of a break before Easter about a month ago.

And so I prayed, he gave me the message.

And it's all about the throne of your heart and who sits on the throne of your heart.

And that's what I'm gonna have you assess over the next several, you know, 30 minutes or so.

And I didn't even realize it was Palm Sunday until Monday.

And then I'm like, oh, that works though.

I see what you're doing there.

It's like he's got a plan, it's weird, you know?

It's like he's got all this stuff figured out and he's just waiting on me to catch up.

It's the craziest thing.

I'm not sure if that's actually how it's going, but I'm pretty sure it is.

But if you have your Bibles with you, and I hope you do, go ahead and open those.

I hope your holy fingers are warmed up.

We're gonna go through a whole lot of scripture today.

Amen.

So first I'm gonna have you turn to Jesus' triumphant and humble entry into Jerusalem in Matthew 21, starting with verse one.

We'll go through to nine.

When he approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage, that's how you say that, by the way.

My whole life, I've read it, Bethpage, because I'm from West Virginia.

Got shoes now, but it's Bethphage.

At the Mount of Olives.

And not to break this up too much, I'm gonna leave you this with you.

I just wanna give you some homework.

Go home and study everything that goes down on that Mount of Olives.

There's no way for to plug it into a message because it would take two hours, but it is the most awesome thing.

If you think God ain't got a plan and got this whole thing figured out, it's creepy.

Go study the Mount of Olives.

Jesus then sent two disciples telling them, go into the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there with her foal.

Untie them and bring them to me.

If anyone says anything to you, say that the Lord needs them and he will send them at once.

This took place so that, everybody say so that.

What was spoken through the prophet might be fulfilled.

This prophecy is found in Zechariah 9, 9 if you're taking notes.

Tell daughter Zion, see your king is coming to you, gentle and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

The disciples went and did just as Jesus directed them.

They brought the donkey and its foal.

Then they laid their clothes on them and he sat on them.

A very large crowd spread their clothes, spread their clothes on the road.

Others were cutting branches from the trees and spreading them on the road.

Then the crowds who went ahead of him and those who followed shouted, Hosanna to the son of David.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

The Lord, Hosanna in the highest heaven.

This small passage, if you've been a Christian for a long time, you've heard it preached every year about the sun.

And if you're not, it might be something that you just kind of skimmed over and it seems like that's kind of cool, but you're not sure the depth of it.

But this is so material to our faith.

To understand that our King, the Lord of Lords, the God of the universe came into Jerusalem exactly how it was predicted 500 years prior through Zachariah to fulfill this prophecy, but that he had made this announcement, this proclamation to all of Jerusalem in the view of everyone.

I want you to follow me for a second.

In the view of everyone that he was the King, the Messiah that these people had been waiting on for hundreds and hundreds of years, without question.

So Zachariah predicts this 500 years prior, and he fulfills this.

Do you know that Jesus fulfilled over 300 prophecies in his life?

I got any like nerds in the house like me, like the science part and like the deep stuff in the word.

I'm gonna give you something that just kind of blew me away.

So this student at MIT decides that he's gonna set out to disprove the Bible.

So he spends 18 months studying the Holy Bible and he becomes a Christian like they all do.

But true story.

But anyway, so he gets to the end of it and he's looking at these prophecies because there's the old triple L, Jesus is either a liar, a lunatic or Lord, right?

So he said, okay, so look at all these prophecies.

Jesus fulfills over 300 of them.

So he does a probability test on whether Jesus could have faked it even five, or whether the prophecy could have guessed it even five prophecies.

What he found is the probability of this happening in the perfection that it happened was 10 to the 300th power.

I know that all of you know what that means.

That translates to one in a centillion.

I don't even know how many zeros are in a centillion.

Like if you Google, I kid you not, if you Google it right now, it doesn't quite tell you how many zeros are in the centillion.

It's a whole lot.

But anyway, so what's crazy is this is a fascinating moment for him, you know, he realizes like, dude, because Jesus didn't fulfill five of them.

He fulfilled another 295, just in case we were unclear on who he was.

But he said the next week, his professor said that he asked him to do a probability test on the probability of one of them dying due to a reversal of the law, first law of thermodynamics.

First law of thermodynamics is the energy can either be created or destroyed, it just changes space.

So put that into perspective.

That means the probability of somebody disappearing, because the law of thermodynamics had reversed.

That came to 10 to the 220th power.

That means that the probability that Jesus could have faked even five of them is over 80 centillion times less likely than it is for you to disappear due to a reversal of the law of thermodynamics.

Let that sink in for a second.

Now your brain's mashed potatoes and I have your attention, but this fulfillment.

Now the scribes and the Pharisees who witnessed this would have known exactly what was going down.

There were no questions.

The scribes and the Pharisees were, their entire lives were wrapped up in studying the scripture.

The scribe's job was literally to transcribe the scriptures day after day after day.

And so what they would do is write them on new scrolls.

And if you're really rich, you could afford these scrolls.

You could have them in your home and you could be really awesome.

Where I'm from, we'd call them conversation pieces.

You know, the folks that have a really big Bible on the coffee table, that's a conversation piece.

What is that?

That's a Bible.

Why is it so big?

I can't see good.

But they would have known.

And so when they saw him, this should have led to the greatest rejoicing of Jerusalem.

And for many it did, but not the Pharisees and the scribes.

Because they would not allow Jesus to sit on the throne of their heart.

Now this seems simplistic, but I'm gonna have you over the next little bit.

I want you to really assess it.

And I want you to honestly assess your own heart.

Who sits on the throne of your heart?

And I want you to ponder it just for a little bit.

And if you just said Jesus in your heart, that's awesome.

I'm so happy.

I want to make sure that we're sure so that if you came in here some way, unsure that when you walk out of these doors, you'll be absolutely positive, rooted in the love of Christ.

That's what we do week after week after week.

We just wanna armor you, send you back out into the battlefield so you can start making tents.

The Pharisees wouldn't let Jesus sit on that throne because it would first require them to get off of it.

I wonder how many today have the same problem.

I wish that selfishness and self-centeredness and self-absorption, I wish that it was just a worldly problem, that it was something we talked about that happens out in the world, but it is just as real inside of the church of God today as it is anywhere else in the world.

And I want you to think about it because nobody would ever admit it.

Nobody would ever be like, yeah, I'm really self-centered.

Like, I'm very, very self-absorbed.

Like, nobody is as important to me as I am to me.

Nobody would say that out loud.

But for a lot of us, it's a reality.

Let me give you some witnesses.

Humility is not self-abuse.

Self-abuse is self-absorption.

Just think about this for a second.

So if you're one of those people, and I'm not beating you down, I want you to have found freedom in Christ.

That's the only reason I would talk about this.

This ain't a Jared jumped my case this morning.

This is Jerry gave you the truth of from the love of God, from his word.

If you beat yourself down consistently, if you're that person that looks yourself in the mirror in the morning and just says all kinds of ugly things about you, you are not humble.

You are absorbed with yourself and you're believing a lie.

And I want you to understand how incredibly damaging this is because the word says that what we bind on earth will be bound in heaven.

And what we loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

This doesn't mean that I have some heavenly power where I'm just, you know, doing stuff up there.

What it does mean is that what I say and the physical is heard in the spiritual.

So those voices that are telling you those things, they're not him.

They're not the voice of our shepherd.

The voice of our shepherd never uses guilt, shame or condemnation to change you.

He will use correction.

Hey, don't do that, do this.

That's gonna suck if you keep going there like that, that's gonna be bad.

Well, you went over here, it's gonna be kind of awesome though, so I won't just, I don't know, it doesn't look like it, just come over here.

You will never be destroyed by what other people say about you, but you will be completely destroyed by what you say about you.

Because every time that you insult yourself, you insult a child of the most high God.

You insult the creation that God created you to be, and that is not what your Lord says about you.

Your Lord says that you are more than a conqueror.

Your Lord says that you are more precious than rubies and gold.

Your Lord thought you were worth dying for.

So the next time that the devil tells you that you're not enough, remind him of who he is and who God says I am.

Do you understand?

Humility looks at like seeing Jesus, understanding that I'm not worthy of his love, but for whatever reason, I am saturated in it.

It washes over me in waves that I can't even understand.

And I can hardly be sad for too long because the love keeps washing and I am willing to kneel.

That is the posture of a Christian.

But self-absorption will lead us to being easily offended.

Now listen, if you are easily offended, you're probably not gonna like the rest of this message.

You're probably not gonna love it here at Valorous Church.

We tell the truth and the truth, it don't always feel good.

But I want you to think for a second about why you're so easily offended.

This is self-centeredness.

Like I get it though, like public is hard.

Like I think that we should have like a grocery store that's set apart from all the other grocery stores where people that go there are people who have actually bought food before in their lives and know how to drive a buggy.

I think that there should be a Walmart that is open for like people who don't hate everybody, you know, that are not just like angry because peanut butter is so hot, you know.

But the offendedness, sometimes it's like a wheel, man.

It's like negativity.

Negativity is a wheel that you get caught under the undertow of and it just starts swimming you and you don't even realize that you're doing it as subconscious and everything is starting to hurt your feelings.

And I don't like what that pastor said so I don't like that pastor anymore.

And you know what?

I am church hurt now and I'm not even gonna go to church anymore.

I'm gonna completely forego all the goodness of God because some dude said something that I didn't like.

That makes about as much sense as a soup sandwich.

You ever gone to a restaurant and had a bad meal?

Did you stop eating?

It's true though, this is real life.

Your self-centeredness and you being on the throne will lead you to being a victim.

Some of us, you may have actually become a victim at some point in your life, but if you are staying a victim, you have chosen it.

You have chosen it.

There is no shot, no way, no how that the Lord of Lords, Jesus Christ sits on the throne of your heart and you can walk and wake up every day as anything other than a victor, anything other than victorious because of the cross of Christ.

I'm getting to something I don't deserve and nobody, no one heaven on earth, nobody can make me a victim of anything.

Nobody can offend me without my permission.

I cannot sit on the throne of my heart, but as long as I do, I'll be offended by everything.

I won't do anything intentional in my relationships.

You'll wander from bad relationship to bad relationship to bad relationship.

Like if you've been married four times and they just all seem to be bad guys or bad ladies, the common denominator there is you.

Like there's only one common denominator.

I'm just being real.

And listen, I'm a country boy.

Like we know about fishing and that where you fish matters, okay?

Like I don't go fish for, you know, mahi-mahi back here in our pond because there ain't none in it.

You know, I go way offshore for that, but if I want bluegills, then I go fishing in this little pond.

And the other part is bait.

What is the bait you're using to catch them?

You might stop catching the wrong kind of fish.

You know what I'm saying?

So I can't sit on the throne of my heart, but nobody else can either.

No pastor, the second thing, no pastor should ever sit on the throne of your heart.

You should never be coming to church to hear what a man or a woman has to say to you.

You should be coming to church so that you can hear what the Holy Spirit wants to say to your spirit, and he uses men and women.

But only when we operate in his power.

But in our culture, man, pastors are celebrities now, which is weird.

That is strange, because we are messed up people.

Like, I'm gonna be real for a second.

If you read your Bible, and like you actually read the whole thing, you will find that all throughout it, God never uses any good dudes, none of them.

He uses murderers, and adulterers, and slanderers, and monsters, and people that killed his people, all of that stuff.

He only ever uses the messed up people because he wants you to be sure that you're sure it's him that does it.

It wasn't Jared that did it.

It wasn't Moses that did it.

It wasn't David that did it.

It was God that did it, because he stacked the odds against himself.

So when we put somebody on a pedestal, definitely on the throne of our heart, man, you are opening yourself up for a world of hurt and disappointment.

We will disappoint you.

I am imperfect.

Even everything that we teach, some parts, I heard this old analogy that all the messages are like a watermelon.

Some parts are sweet and good to eat, and other parts you gotta spit it out.

It might not be for you.

I might be preaching to two people in here today.

It was worth getting up for.

And if it ain't for you, then if Jesus is firmly planted on the throne of your heart, then awesome, awesome, awesome.

I'll clap for you at the end.

But I say, if you're sure that you're sure right now, just reassess and make sure.

But putting people on the throne of our heart will cause us to be double-minded.

Bible talks pretty strongly about that.

As an example, if you're coming to a specific church when a specific preacher preaches, and you go to a different church, when that preacher doesn't preach, stay at the other church.

You are double-minded.

I wanna tell you something that's the truth from God's word.

When you put Jesus on the throne of your heart, Jesus Christ will call you to a church.

He will not call you to three, four, five, six, seven different churches.

He will call you to one church, and that is the church where he intends to plant your behind so that you can grow, and you can develop, and you can link arms with some other people that are in that church that he has planted their behind in that church too, so that you can go out and make a dent in the world.

Because the minute you put your hand up and say, I'll follow God, you've got a mission.

God always had it for you, you just weren't walking in it.

It was over here, and you was just like, la, la, la, la, la.

But there's two roads laid out before each of us.

But he will not plant you in multiple churches.

Now, I'm not saying that if you live in Raleigh right now, and you come to Valorous when you're here, there's nothing wrong with that.

I visit some churches too when I've traveled.

There's nothing, or if you live half the year up there, half the year down here, it's great that you were in a church up there, and in a church there, but if you were here on vacation, you were planted in that church in Raleigh, that's where God has put you, that's where you should be serving.

Look at your neighbor and say, you should be serving.

This is not me calling for volunteers.

I wanna be really intentional.

I run our whole front end.

For those of you who don't know me, I'm Jared Walls.

I'm the associate pastor here and the student pastor.

There's never a time when I'm like, we just need volunteers because I don't want warm bodies.

Okay, I can get them.

I go over to Lowe's and find, you know, a bunch of them.

What I want are people whose hearts are submitted to God who aren't here to serve me or to fulfill any commitment to me or to anybody else, but are here to fulfill a commitment to the God of the universe.

I want people who want to do it because they realize that Christianity is not a consumer game.

It's not something you come and you just take in.

You're like, yeah, that was great.

It's awesome.

I'm gonna go out and live my life, the rest of my life, the way I do it.

You're supposed to be involved in it.

God will call you to serve in that church.

Next thing I wrote down, my spouse cannot sit on the throne of my heart.

I wanna be clear here.

Every single person in here has a throne room inside of your heart.

The word says that the body is a temple.

Okay, and we're gonna talk about that in just a second.

There should be a lot of people, maybe not a lot of people, there should be some people inside the throne room of your heart.

But there is only one who is sitting.

And if there is anyone else in there that is not kneeling while he sits, get him out.

Get him out.

Don't let them have that space.

I wanna say it again.

Just make sure you're in the back, you heard me.

If there's anybody in the throne room of your heart that is not kneeling to the one who is sitting, you need to get them out.

That is toxic, it's not doing you any service.

And you're not doing them any service to let them remain.

In Matthew 7, 13, Jesus says, enter by the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction.

And those who enter it are many, for the gate is narrow and the way is hard, everybody say hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few.

If Jesus is on the throne of your heart, that means that things are about to get difficult.

Do you know why the gate is narrow?

To make you strip off everything.

The gate is not wide enough for your will and God's will to go through it.

There's only room for God's will, that's it.

His will is the only will that'll fit through that gate.

There's not room for your baggage, there's not room for your shame and your bad decisions and your unhealthy lifestyle and the thought process that you have that you have not submitted to God, because if you submit them, he will take them off of you so that you can walk through the narrow gate.

Now, once you're through the gate, the road is hard, and it's hard by design.

It's not hard accidentally like, oh yeah, it's just tough down here.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

It's paved and wide and easy to travel.

There's a rest stop about every 13 minutes for those guys that are hitting their 40s and things are weird now.

I used to yell at my kids, and now they're like, dad, seriously?

It's been 30 minutes, shut up.

There's not room for your baggage, your self-pity, or anyone else's faith.

See, if you have a pastor on the throne of your heart, that's what you're doing.

You are operating on borrowed faith.

You can't.

You can't have a relationship with God through another person.

You can't live vicariously through somebody else when God's called you to a personal relationship.

God already has a relationship with that person.

He don't want another one.

You know how messed up I am?

You know how much work I am for God?

Probably not a lot, but it seems like it.

If he ever runs out of grace, it'll be because I used it.

But he wants a relationship with you.

And as long as you try to ride on your mama's faith, or on your mamaw's faith, or on your papa's faith, or the pastor's faith, or the worship team's faith, all of that, all of us, all of us work hard all week long maintaining a relationship with the God of the universe, practicing these things out to make sure that when we get here, we can correctly, and through the Spirit, lead you into worship.

So that, not so that you hear me and you leave thinking, man, Jared is really a great preacher, that's awesome.

But so that you might hear from the living God yourself.

So that you might say, you know what?

I don't know, I wanna go home and check.

I'm gonna go home and I'm gonna read a few chapters.

I'm gonna see all the stuff around that to make sure what he said was actually in the context of what the Bible says.

How many of you know that context matters?

And this is a caveat, but really quick.

Context matters more than the two chapters around it.

Context is in the context of 66 love letters, okay?

Example, Paul says in one, women should sit down and shut up in church.

I just saw your faces.

Oh no, he didn't.

Baby, we ain't coming to church anymore.

That guy, he's a misogynist.

He can't even say misogynist, but he's a misogynist.

And then another one says that if a woman has a prophecy, she ought to prophesy and that no one should hinder her.

And then, you know, there's a lady who had a church in her house who was clearly leading that church under the authority of her husband, which was right.

So obviously, he's not saying that women should just sit down and shut up, but he was talking to a specific church that had a specific problem with some specific ladies that nobody could hear, because they wouldn't shut up.

So he said, tell those ladies, shh, unless they have a prophecy, then they can tell it in the context of the entirety of your Bible.

You know, the only way you're gonna know if it's in the context of the entirety of your Bible, you gotta read the whole thing, baby.

You gotta read the whole thing.

When you get your favorite song on the radio, you don't listen to like the second verse and turn it off, do you?

This is the greatest song ever written.

Listen to the whole thing.

I know it's eight minutes, like stairway to heaven, but it's worth it.

But it's the same reason.

It's hard by design because we serve a king who sees beyond who we have been and sees into who we're becoming.

The journey's hard so that you grow, so that you're built in that journey, so that you become something that you absolutely positively were not before and could not be without him.

And it's for the same reason the Bible calls God a jealous God, which is humbling in itself, to think that the God of the universe thinks enough of me to be jealous for me.

But I want you to understand the jealousy.

The jealousy isn't like an insecure husband or an insecure wife, okay?

And I want you to understand what I'm saying.

If your husband or your wife are jealous, this is, and unless it gets to a weird place where like they tell you what, you know, what you can, who you can talk to and all kinds of weird stuff outside of what like a Christian marriage should look like, if your husband and your wife are not jealous for you at all, they don't really love you that much.

I want you to think about it.

God is jealous, He loves us perfectly.

But God's not jealous because He's insecure.

The Bible says that He's surrounded by billions of angels day and night who sing, holy, holy, holy is the Lord.

He is not wondering about how awesome He is.

But He knows your heart and He knows the infrastructure of your heart because He built it.

And He knows that there's not room in there for you to worship Him and somebody else.

It's an impossibility.

You'll become double-minded and double-minded people, you know what they are?

Lost.

You know what they do?

Die.

They cannot find the way to go and so they wander and they wander and they wander because they're listening to too many voices or they're listening to the wrong voice altogether.

The only way you'll know if the voice that you're hearing is the right voice is if you know the scripture.

Because the devil will use scripture incorrectly out of context.

But if you put it back into context and you're like, oh no, that's not what he says at all.

Remember when he took Jesus into the wilderness?

He knew nothing but scripture.

And Jesus said, well, dummy, I wrote that.

Here's what it means.

So shut up, sit down, get out of here.

I'll see you in about 15 minutes and you're gonna have a headache for the rest of eternity.

But there's not room in there for me to worship anything else.

But if you don't worship God wholly, you'll worship something else.

It's the creation that you are.

You can't get away from it.

You were built to praise and you will praise whether you know Jesus or not.

Give you some examples.

How built we are to praise.

You see a puppy, what do you do?

Ah, that's praise.

You eat really, really good shrimp and grits down in Charleston, what do you do?

Yeah, that's praise.

Your favorite song comes on the radio from 1987, Madonna.

What do you do?

You roll up the window so nobody can hear and you yell in the car.

That's praise.

Your wife comes out to go to dinner and she looking fine, what do you do?

That's praise.

Okay, it's what you are.

You're gonna do it.

The best thing you can do is take all that praise that God gave you, sit it down to the Lord of Lords and watch what happens.

Your life will change, your children's lives will change, your family's life will change.

You will see ways through the wilderness that you couldn't see before.

Your spirit will have you seeing around corners and seeing through walls.

And suddenly things start to make a whole lot of sense without making any sense at all.

They'll make a whole lot of sense without making any sense at all.

I don't know how to explain it other than that.

That's all I got.

I understand a lot about life, but it don't all make sense.

And that's the end of the sermon.

If we look at Jesus's first action as king, this leads me to my second point to clear the temple.

In Matthew 21, verses 12 through 13, this is the first thing Jesus does.

Jesus went into the temple and threw out all those buying and selling.

He overturned, everybody say overturned, the tables of the money changers and the chairs of those selling doves.

He said to them, it is written, it is written, my house will be called a house of prayer.

That's what we are.

But you are making it a den of thieves.

And I wonder how many of us are sitting at tables that God sent us to flip.

How many of us are pandering at tables that God sent us to turn over?

See, because nowhere in the Bible does it say that you need to be nice.

It says you need to be loving, you need to be kind, but Jesus says that you ought to be ruthless with your sin.

You ought to be ruthless with sin.

He said it so much that if your right eye offends you, pluck it out and cast it from you.

If your right hand offends you, cut it off and throw it out.

He wasn't just trying to have a whole bunch of people swimming in circles.

But he was trying to give you a picture of what it looks like when you truly sit him on the throne of your heart.

Nothing else will do it.

Because all of the sin, we only sin for good things.

Think about this for a second.

We only sin for the good things.

The devil takes what God has already promised us, what we already have promised in Christ Jesus, and he turns the dial just a little bit.

Sex is good.

God wants you to have it, a lot of it, with your wife.

Not anywhere else.

But the devil's like, you don't really need to do that.

Like, look at all the pretty women.

Look at all those hot guys.

Just twist it off just a little bit.

You know, lying, most of us, when you do it, I know nobody lies here.

But if you did, it would probably be for self-preservation.

Or, I don't wanna hurt their feelings.

That's a godly thing to do, right?

No, there's never a good reason to tell a lie, because you know what happens when you lie.

Eventually, they're probably gonna find out, A, your life is gonna be stressful, because you gotta remember all the lies.

And then you gotta remember the lies that you're told to cover those lies.

And after a while, you don't even remember what the truth is anymore because you've been lying for so long.

And God says he hates it.

See, it's one of those things in the Bible that God ain't playing with.

God says, I hate a lying tongue.

There are a few things, seven things that he despises, he hates.

Brother, if you are lying consistently right now, please, today, before you leave this building, repent of it, sit down under the authority of God, put him on the throne, and he'll show you what telling the truth looks like.

Oh, it feels good.

It doesn't always sound good to other people.

And everybody's like, I want the truth.

Just tell me the truth.

But they don't, until you actually tell them the truth, and they don't want the truth so much anymore.

But you'll be free.

That's what it's all about.

Jesus wants you to have freedom, but some of us need to get into our heart, and we need to start clearing out that throne room.

We need to start handing out dismissals like Oprah.

You know, like, you get out, and you get out, and you get out, and you get out, and block your number, block your number.

I'm never calling that guy again.

This lady is flipping crazy.

I'm never talking to her again.

Just start getting them out.

The throne room is not big enough to be so crowded.

There's only room for you and a few other people.

But the temple, he cleared out a literal temple.

We need to clear out what the Bible talks about in 1 Corinthians 6, 19 through 20.

Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?

You are not your own, for you were bought with a price.

So glorify God in your body.

That means a few things.

That means that I ought to be working with my body.

Because if you go to Zechariah 9, it says that the king came riding a beast of burden.

I don't think that was an accident.

Because in your walk with Jesus, there's a whole bunch of donkey work.

That's what Clay calls it.

That means just heavy lifting stuff that ain't so glorious.

And it's not like we're all just here all week, like kumbaya, my Lord.

Like we're like lifting stuff and doing stuff.

Like I'll, my wife gets mad because I go through like three costume changes a day.

That's what she calls it.

But like, I sweat through two different things usually in a day.

Like, I mean, like I sweat a lot.

So I mean, that just happens.

But you know, but like the stuff that we're doing.

So a lot of it is donkey work.

And that's important for us to understand.

But also our body really matters.

Like taking care of yourself, it really matters.

You know, I come from a Southern Baptist background in a little place called Brandywine, West Virginia where everything was gonna send you to hell except for overeating.

Like you was going to hell for everything that you thought did or thought about thinking about doing except for going to Golden Corral when we get done over in Harrisonburg.

It's gonna be great.

But man, God says your body is a temple.

Start clearing it out.

See, so often when we get to Jesus and we find our faith in God, we start, I'm gonna do all of these things.

I'm gonna add all these things.

Jesus says, why don't you start taking some things out?

Why don't you say, okay, well, that's not there and that's not there and this isn't godly and that's not what he wants.

The Bible clearly says not to do that.

I really liked that one though.

Just get it out.

Clear the temple.

And what you'll be left with is a good God.

Take the media and politicians and politics out of your throne room.

Stop giving them so much rent-free space in your mind.

Donald Trump ain't never gonna save you.

Okay, ain't no politician anywhere.

And loving Israel the way that God says that we ought to doesn't mean that I agree with every geopolitical decision that's made there.

It means that I love the people and I love them like I love all the people of the world and I want every single one of them, whatever color they are, however high, tall, whatever, every shape that they are, I want all of them to find faith in Jesus.

I want them all to be set free.

I don't do this because it's fun.

So we start cleaning.

We take the media, the politicians out of the throne room.

We take drinking, we take drugs, fornication, porn, anger, hatred, bitterness, rage, slander, anything unholy like money, and you get it out of the room.

The second thing we need to do when we begin to sit Jesus on the throne of our heart is adopt the heart of Jesus.

See, when we get our throne room in order, church, it sets us free.

Free to be truly humble without self-abuse.

Free to be strong without the need to flex it.

Free to shine our light brightly and not put a basket over it.

The Bible speaks very clearly about this.

So often, and I want you to think for a second, how often have you dimmed your light so that it didn't make somebody else uncomfortable?

How often have you put a basket over that light that Jesus put on you, that he meant to take the lamp off, set you on a lamp stand so that you would give light to the world?

How many times have you put a basket over it so you didn't make somebody else feel uncomfortable?

But now both of you in the dark.

When in reality, what Jesus was saying, because he was right and you were wrong, is to take that basket off because if I shine the light as bright as I can, what he's placed inside of me, that gives everybody else around me the permission to shine theirs too.

And then if we start doing that, darkness starts to fade into the background, starts to fade into an afterthought, and my God is glorified in the streets, in the churches, in the hospitals, everywhere you go, at your job site.

I know those people need Jesus.

So I see you and your frustrations.

I know they need Jesus, start praying for them.

But we adopt the heart of Jesus, these things start to change.

And see, the King of Kings came riding, not a war horse like they expected, but he came riding that beast of burden.

He came humbly on a work animal to do work.

Like you talked about in Matthew 9, 37.

He said, the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.

Therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest and to send out laborers into his harvest.

If you're sitting here and you think you're saved because you said a prayer, and it has not caused a lasting response in your life, I want you to ask yourself, I want you to ask God, did I really encounter you?

So I think the greatest trick of the enemy in 2026 is a whole bunch of people who think that they're saved, who are going to end up in hell.

A whole lot of people who prayed a prayer and then sat down waiting for the train to come in.

And when they get there, the Bible says that there will be many.

He says, away from me, I never knew you.

And there'll be great weeping and gnashing of teeth.

That means that some will be heartbroken.

I can't believe it.

Good Lord, didn't we sing the songs?

Didn't we go to the church?

Didn't we join that Bible study?

And he'll say, away from me, I never knew you.

And then there's gonna be some that gnash their teeth.

How dare you send me to hell?

How dare you?

I did all of the stuff I was supposed to do.

I checked the boxes.

I recited the scriptures, all of that.

How could you?

I'm gonna tell you this.

I know that I know that I'm saved.

I know that my redeemer lives.

But if for some crazy reason, I have fooled myself all these years, and one day I wake up and I'm in the pit, I will know for certain that God is just and that I'm getting exactly what I've deserved.

But if on the other hand, things go the way I think they'll go, and one day a trumpet sounds, and I raise out of my grave to see my savior's face and look in his eyes and kiss his beautiful face and wrap my arms around him, then I will know that my God is merciful.

And we don't want justice, church.

We want mercy.

We want compassion.

See, Christianity is not an emotional response.

And this is crazy, because so many people in the church today, like, man, I just don't get that feeling from the worship anymore.

Baby, you are chasing a feeling.

You are not chasing a God.

God will sit you down, hurt your feelings, make your toes sore.

Okay, like, think about my wife.

Like, when God talks to my wife, he's so gentle.

I guess with me, he's like an old football coach.

You know, he's like, are you done yet?

You gonna just lay there and cry the whole time?

We got stuff to do, let's go, you know?

Y'all are laughing, but I think that's what I need.

But I'll give you an example.

Several years ago, God called me to really pour into my marriage.

Men, this is something God will tell you to do.

I really started pouring into my marriage.

And me and Tasha had been in a bad spot for a long time.

And we just weren't connected.

Like, we were like roommates.

Like, we lived in the same house.

Like, we shared the same address.

You know, like, we liked each other.

We just, you know, that was it.

I liked her.

But God said, invest, and I want you to give it your all.

So I gave them all for a couple of years.

Hear me for a second.

A couple of years until finally one day I broke down and I said, God, she don't want it.

It don't matter what I do.

It don't matter how big I get, how strong I get, how ripped I get.

It don't matter how much I wash the dishes, how much I mop the floor, how much I change her oil, how much I wash her car.

It don't matter what I do.

Okay, so I'm done.

I'm done.

And he said, one of the times I feel like I heard the audible voice of God, how about you sit down, shut up, and do what I told you to do?

And I'll do what I'm gonna do in her.

Let me tell you what happened.

Three months later, something shifted.

Still to this day, I couldn't tell you what that was.

But I'll say that this is the 20th year of our marriage now, and we are better than we have ever been.

Not because I did all that stuff, but because we made Jesus the king of our marriage.

I follow Jesus first.

And the sexiest thing to me about my wife is she loves him way more than she loves me.

I ain't worried about how she twerks, I wanna see how she worships.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Emotions die, faith doesn't.

See, adopting the mindset will cause you to have a heart of flesh and not of stone.

You will begin to be compassionate.

That's the last thing I wrote down.

The compassion of Jesus.

Putting Jesus on the throne of your heart will cause me to have compassion on God's children.

See, the world has mucked up that word compassion in exchange for sympathy.

Sympathy is useless.

Sympathy is, I see somebody drowning and I know that I can't swim and I jump in after them so they don't die alone.

That's what sympathy is.

I mean, sincerely, how many of you want pity?

How many of you have ever found pity useful in your life?

How many of you have ever found self-pity useful in your life?

Hey, we've all had some of that.

Anybody ever grown in it?

Anybody ever been like, man, I'm glad I sat on that pity potty for six months?

That was a great idea.

No.

Compassion does though.

See, compassion realizes that you're drowned in, understands what could happen, goes over here and grabs a rope and throws it to them, and then pulls them ashore, and then compassion stays to teach them how to swim.

That's compassion.

Compassion is better translated into empathy.

Empathy means I see how you're feeling and I know how you're feeling because I felt it.

See, that's why God had to put on flesh and bone and come to the earth.

Not just to be on the greatest rescue mission of the world, but because we need, like it says in Hebrews, a high priest who understands us.

A high priest who's gone through what we've gone through.

The king of my heart, sitting on the throne of my heart, I need to know that he's felt some stuff that I feel.

You know what the Bible says?

He felt all of it.

There is nothing you have gone through in your life that he hasn't felt.

The betrayal, that sting, he knows that sting well.

All of these things, the physical pain, the hatred from his people, the bullying, all of those things that you've dealt with, he's dealt with them too.

And so because of that, my job is to be like my father.

So I should have compassion.

Compassion looks like when you're driving down the road and that dude in that Ford is driving like an idiot.

I'm saying Raptors change people, okay?

I don't know, it's like, I mean, it's not just Raptors, okay, it's Escalades.

You know, just being real and testless.

Like this will fit anywhere.

Oh no, the battery's low, but I'm saving the world.

Even though it costs way more in coal to charge this than it would in gas to fill it up.

So much coal, sorry.

It changes who he is in my eyes.

And suddenly, instead of flipping out and cussing in my car, I know none of y'all cuss.

Out loud, in public, me neither.

Where people can hear me, ever.

You start praying for him.

You start thinking, man, I've been that guy.

I've been that guy flying through the lanes, freaking out, I wonder what's going on with him right now.

You know what, I don't know what's going on, but I bet he needs Jesus.

Let me pray.

Father, would you please help my brother right there?

I don't know what he's going through, I don't know what's happening in his life, but God, will you protect him, get him home safely, and make sure that he don't hurt anybody else along the way.

Lord, would you help him.

That lady that's in your HOA that is always a problem, maybe instead of being like, man, I can't stand carrying no more, I can't deal with this.

Lord, please, would you help Karen?

God, would you make her just stop looking at my grass every Tuesday morning to see how tall it is?

God, would you please have her stop freaking out about the sign that's in my yard?

That's what compassion looks like.

Compassion is really feeling for people.

I wonder what the world would look like if we did.

I wonder what the world would look like if just this church did, just this couple thousand people.

We started going out into the business in the world every single day, really feeling for people, seeing how they feel, feeling it with them.

Bible says, mourn with those who mourn, rejoice with those who rejoice.

That doesn't mean that I just fall susceptible to every bad mood you're in.

That means that I love you enough, and I understand that you probably have some things going on in your life, probably look a lot like some of the things going on in my life.

I bet we can connect on that.

And when somebody comes, it's got a problem, I start asking them to tell me the story instead of the transgender girl who became a man and comes and seems like she just wants an argument.

And instead of starting an argument, you say, can you tell me your story?

What happened?

How did this go?

And then I started to see things through her eyes.

Then I started to see things through Jesus's eyes.

I started seeing it through the lens, and I stopped being so flipping angry all the time.

Oh, you can't be loving and angry at the same time.

You can't be loving and angry at the same time.

God didn't call you to be angry all the time.

He called you to be loving all the time because the one who's sitting on the throne of your heart, they call him what he is, is love.

But love is not God.

God is love, but love is not God.

But when we begin to operate in compassion, we begin to see the world with different eyes.

We begin serving his kingdom with love and sincere hearts, not for some riches in heaven, although that's something the Bible speaks about, but understanding that for Jesus, the inheritance for him was me and you.

He already had all the riches.

He wanted me and you.

So if we're gonna be like our father, that should be our mission every single day.

How many people could I impact with my loving spirit?

How many people could I impact with my light every single day so that they would at least start to ask the question, why is she like that?

What makes her so flippin' happy all the time?

Whatever it is I wanna see him maybe get crazy with the cheese whiz, invite him to church.

Introduce them to the one who made you like this so that they can be like this because we are all called to be disciples that make disciples.

Jesus poured himself out for me and you and he is a worthy king.

And when I think about how he loves me, it changes me.

It breaks me.

It humbles me to my core.

2 Peter 3, 9 says, the Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that anyone should perish, but that all should reach repentance.

And when I think of how patient he's been with me, how good he's been to me, man, it cuts me inside.

It sets me down.

When I think of all the times that he chased me down, all the times that I ran straight from him and I knew him, I knew he was good.

I had tasted, I had seen, I had heard the good news of Jesus when I was 12 years old and I got saved on the front step of Brandywine Baptist Church.

I knew and my mama told me about him and my mama didn't always live it out perfectly, but she tried to live it out for me.

But I ran.

We talk about Jesus next week and Judas and how he sold Jesus for 30 silver pieces.

At least he got paid.

I sold Jesus to get high.

And yet every time that I pushed him away, even knowing who he was, he grabbed my hands and he kissed him.

He was so patient with me.

And still to this day, he's so patient with me.

And even to this day, even though I know the things and I've read the scriptures and I read them every day and all of this, I still fall short.

I still mess up.

Every night I find myself on my knees saying, God, forgive me.

I don't know why I'm like this and I wish that I could change it, but I can't change it.

So God, would you change it for me?

And he says, yes, I'll change it for you.

And we start to see the world in a totally different way because if they only knew the way that he loves them, if they're still breathing, he's still chasing.

If they're still breathing, his hands are still out for them.

He's still begging them to just come to him.

You don't have to leave here the way you came here.

You don't have to live a life like this.

You don't have to always be wondering if you're okay or when you're gonna be okay, when things are gonna change.

You can begin to follow him.

Just sit him on the throne and kneel.

He's worthy.

The Bible says that one day in Revelation 20, he's gonna come back and a great trumpet will sound.

And I don't care if they bury me six feet, 200 feet, 300 feet, my tail's getting up.

And I'm gonna see my Lord's face.

And I will be among the masses that rejoice at his name when he comes back as the conquering king, not as the lamb the second time.

There will also be a great pit of fire and destruction.

I want you to understand what this is as I'm not selling fire insurance.

In Matthew 25, Jesus tells us a parable about a shepherd who separated the sheep from the goats.

And in the last part, he says, there was a fiery abyss created for the devil and his fallen angels.

Hell wasn't made for you.

No human being was ever supposed to go.

It was never supposed to be like that.

And now to this day, he hangs on a cross, bloodied and battered at the gates of hell.

And he says, baby, you are mine.

And if you're going in there, you'll walk over my dead body.

That's the only way.

If you continue to choose on the path that you're on, you can't expect anything good to come from it.

But today you can make a real choice.

You could hear these stories about this King.

And I've got 150, 200, 300 people that could give you a testimony of how good we are, how good he is to us.

Livvy Mae had cancer.

And just this past week, she had cancer for about six weeks and she rang the bell because they couldn't find any cancer anymore.

We got people whose backs were so bent they couldn't walk.

But God got them straightened out and give them a car too.

We've got babies that weren't supposed to make it that are seven years old now.

We've got babies that weren't supposed to make it that couldn't breathe that are singing worship now.

That God is the same God.

And if he did it for me, he'll do it for you.

All you have to do is kneel and repent.

How long are you gonna sit on that throne?

How has it served you?

How long are you gonna let him or her or they or them sit on that throne?

How has it served you?

But if you would kneel today, let today be the day, your whole life could change.

In just a second, they're gonna come out, they're gonna sing a song.

It's that little guy's very favorite song.

The only song he would go to sleep to when he was a baby.

And if you feel that tug on your heart right now, I just want you to be bold.

I want you to not worry about what all these people think.

And there's gonna be some prayer partners that line up here.

And you don't have to just come to the altar if you're giving your life to Jesus or you're recommitting.

If you just need some prayer, it is okay.

Don't be so prideful as to think that you can't do it because of what people might think.

I don't care what people think, I care what God thinks.

And if they've got some faith to put it with my faith and we can do something together, by God, I'm gonna do it.

Be that person today.

And if you wanna pray that prayer, I ask that you do it there, you do it down here, wherever God calls you to.

But before you leave today, stop, let us put a Bible in your hand, let us know about your decision, not so we can check another tally box of how many people got saved at Valorous Church, but so that we can arm you.

We can send some people to wrap around you, to rally around you, to lift you up because the days are hard, the road is narrow, and the gate is narrow, and the road is hard by design, but we will help you grow with the power of the Holy Spirit and to everything God planned for you to be.

Let me pray for you.

Father, thank you for today.

I thank you for this opportunity that we get every week to come together and worship you and praise you, God.

Thank you that we live in a country where men and women died and gave their lives so that we could have this right.

I thank you for the honor that it is to speak your word and to be able to read your word, Lord, without persecution.

Father, I thank you for every man, woman, boy, and girl in this room today.

God, I just ask that you would move mighty in their hearts.

God, if there's one here, even just one, that doesn't know you as their Lord and Savior, God, I ask that today would be the day that they lay their burden down and pick up yours because it's light and it's easy to bear.

Father, I ask that today would be the day that they link arms with the local church to glorify you.

God, help us to keep the basket off of our lights and shine brightly for you, but above all, God, help us to have you seated on the throne of our heart and never lose sight of how important it is.

God, we love you, we praise you, and all God's children said.

Amen