Rooted and Ready

We are not a perfect church. If you came here for the first time, you were hoping for a perfect church, I'm sorry to disappoint you. If you were hoping that everyone would be friendly and nice and smile all the time, and it's like coming into Whoville and we're going to sing even when our tree gets stolen, you're going to be disappointed because God works through broken people to make up a broken church to fulfill his kingdom work. [Music] But we are so glad that you're here and just ready to dive into God's word. If you have your Bible, go ahead and grab it and open to 2 Corinthians chapter 7. 2 Corinthians chapter 7. And today we are continuing on in this series that we've called Rooted in Holiness. And we've been studying through the book of 2 Corinthians. And as we've gone through this, this consistent theme has come throughout this book that we introduced at kind of the beginning in the first chapter of it. And we've seen this play out as the word of God just continues to breathe in here. But we said the serious theme is what we are rooted in determines what we will be ready for. As Paul is giving this letter and and kind of preaching this letter to the church at Corenth, he's been addressing different issues that have come up. They've had issues and in inside a city in Corinth that was like a today like modern-day Vegas. It was it was a very high-end area but surrounded by immorality and the church the church had the pressure around them and that pressure created divisions within their church. False teaching started to arise and all these issues that started coming. Paul keeps on preaching is how do you make sure you are seeking God? How do you make sure you're right with him? How do you make sure you are grounded in the right things? And as we've preached through this at Cross Church, it it's become glaring as Paul has shown us is how does this impact us? And we've seen how do we be part of a church family? How do we be part of something that is bigger than ourselves? And and you're going to have people at church that are going to make you mad cuz you're going to make other people mad at church. And Paul talks, how do we how do we go through those relationships? A few weeks ago, we talked about forgiveness and reconciliation and how do we live a lifestyle where we don't cut people out of our lives, but we bring them in and we restore these relationships. Well, as we come to chapter 7, Paul's almost going to have this time where he he kind of lets us reflect and be like, have we learned what we've been reading this entire time? And it got me thinking, do you guys ever have these moments where you have these thoughts and maybe these uh long deep thoughts and you're like, I don't have any deep thoughts in my head. Uh but maybe every now and then you do, right? And you have these thoughts and be like, what am I doing? Like not at this moment, but with my life. Like what am I doing with my life? Do I know like what I'm doing if I'm an adult? Like how functioning of an adult I am? Yep. Just me. All right. Um and you ever have these moments? You're like, do do am I on the right path? Do I know what to have in my life? Like, am I having a crisis? And I'm not at a midlife. Actually, I might be at a midlife crisis pretty soon. Okay. Um, it's getting close. But it's like you have these ideas. And here, let me play this out for you, is there is no like rule book, and I even I kind of Googled this is like, how do you know you're a fully functioning adult? And there's not a great list out there. Like, here's the thing is you become 18 and they're like, you're an adult now. like you're actually still a, you know, stupid and a kid, but you're legally an adult and have adult consequences. Then you go further. You're like, "Okay, I I can keep doing this." You get a job. And then you get a real career job and you're like, "Do I know what I'm doing yet?" Nope. And then you get married and you're like, "Do I know what I'm doing yet?" Nope. But your wife does, so that helps, right? They can tell you what you're doing. And and then you keep going. You're like, "Okay, I'm going to get a house." Then you get a house. Like, "Now I know what I'm doing." And then you're like, "Nope, don't know what I'm doing." But YouTube is helpful in fixing everything that breaks in your house. Right? Thank goodness for that. If I grew up in a nonyou age, my house would be a disaster and I'd have no money. And then you're like, then I have kids. Then you really, when you think you know what you're doing, you have no idea what you're doing. And then your kids get older. And I've talked to people whose kids have left their house. And maybe you're in that stage. And I've talked to you and you say you don't know what you're doing and what your kids are doing. And then there's this time in life, you're like, "How do we how do we know we've arrived? How do we know we have it? How do we know we're on the right track?" And spiritually, I think sometimes we get to these crisis and these questions and this thought process in our head as well. And Paul, as we get to 2 Corinthians chapter 7, he actually addresses some of these concerns of everything he's been saying throughout this chapter. But I love it. He says, "So then, dear friends, this church at Corinth he's been writing to that he's been pouring into." He calls them his dear friends. He says since we have these promises, we'll unpack these promises later, but this is kind of going back these promises of the truth of God's word, the gospel, that we are sons and daughters of God when we call on him as our savior. He says, "Since we have these promises," he said, "let us cleanse ourselves from every impurity of the flesh and of the spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God." Paul says, "You want to know you've arrived? You have arrived when holiness has been brought to completion." And through the rest of this chapter, Paul is going to unpack how do we know our holiness is complete? How do we know our holiness is moving in the direction? How do we know in our spiritual walk we're becoming closer to God and not further away? We asked this through the lens of the series we've been in is how do we know we are rooted in holiness? How do we know we're headed the right direction? How do we know we're working towards the right things? How do we know we're not just lost in the shuffle and not having just a crisis in our own head of been like, "Am I in a fully functioning adult?" If we're asking the question, "Am I a fully functioning Christian? And Paul starts diving into the answer starting in verse two as we continue on in this. He says, "Make room for us in your hearts. We have wronged no one. We have corrupted no one. We have taken advantage of no one." Verse three, "I don't say this to condemn you since I have already said that you are in our hearts to die together and to live together." He says, "I am very frank with you. I have great pride in you. I am filled with encouragement. I am overflowing with joy in all our afflictions. In fact, when we came into Macedonia, we had no rest. Instead, we were troubled in everywhere, in every way, conflicts on the outside, fears within. But God, who comforts the d downcast, comforted us by the arrival of Titus. And in verse 7, and not only by his arrival, but also by the comfort he received from you, he told us about your deep longing, your sorrow, and your zeal for me, so that I rejoiced even more. Here's how Paul continues as we get into this idea of how do we know we are rooted in holiness? How do we know we're headed the right direction? The first indicator we get of this is we have a forever family. Paul starts this chapter with an appeal in verse two. He says, "Make room for us in your hearts." Now, now you got to understand the context here of Paul has been writing to this church at Corenth. And a lot of the writings when you kind of read him in the original context is him nicely saying, "You guys are a bunch of morons. Fix this stuff." And it's the harshest letters we see in the entire New Testament. Is constantly correcting and correcting and correcting. And there's this awkward relationship of him like almost like yelling at them like they're children's. And and as he's doing that, he's saying he starts us. He says, "Hey, make room for us in your hearts." He's like, "I know I know we've had a rocky past. I know there's been hurt feelings. I know there's been misunderstandings. Even some of you, he said, have accused, they accused Paul of taking advantage of them and being a false teacher." But Paul says, "That's not true." And then notice where he goes. He says, "We have wronged no one. We have corrupted no one. We have taken advantage of no one." You see, this isn't Paul being defensive. This is Paul demonstrating what it looks like to be rooted in holiness. You fight for relationships. You do not fight against them. Check Check out verse three again. He says, "I don't say this to condemn you since I have already said that you are in our hearts to die together and to live together." I I don't know if you can get more family language to that. He's like, "I know we disagree, but we are going to live together and we're going to die together." Paul's like, "You are stuck with me." This past week, uh, we were setting up a fantasy football league and and my vision for, uh, Cross Church in 2026 going into football season is we have about 30 leagues that all of you guys are a part of, and on Sunday mornings, we talk trash about our fantasy. Actually, could be a terrible idea cuz you'll all be checking your scores at 10:00 a.m. games. All right. Um, but anyway, we're we're setting this up and I got all guys from church that were doing a fantasy league and I was talking about one of my buddies and when I was at our Phoenix campus, I had like two guys that liked football and and he was one of them and and he was like and I would tell something about football and they'd all look at me like I'm have no idea what I'm talking about. I'm like, "All right, and I lost you." And and so he's like, "I'm glad you finally have people in a congregation that loves football with you." And I'm like, "Amen, dude. I love it." I was like, "One problem. Half of them are Seahawks fans. It's awful. Okay. And and they're even most of them are in 9:00 a.m. All right. So I still know you're here though. And and here's what he told me cuz he's actually from Seattle. He said maybe he said you should just become a Seahawks fan. And I said as a native Phoenician, as one who has been born here, bred here, lived here, I will die before I cheer for the Seahawks. All right. Yes, you can amen that. He said, "You'll also die before you see a Super Bowl." And I said, "Rude." Okay. He's from Seattle. So I said, "Hey, at least we have a basketball team cuz the Sonics, they gone, right?" Okay. So, two of you got that. All right. Um, cool. But here's what Paul is saying. There will be disagreements in the church. We will cheer for different football teams, and you are wrong, and I am right. But at the end of the day, we are family in a greater way. And we are part of this family of God. This forever family that Paul is telling them, this family goes deep. This family's roots are bigger than earthly things that separate us because we will be spending eternity together. And here's the first indicator I think that we're rooted in holiness under this idea of having this forever family is Paul tells us is we need to stop treating our relationships as disposable. Think about this for example in our culture. Our culture definitely treats relationships as disposable. When when people wrong you too much when people hurt you too much. Our world our culture says severise and move on. Uh my kids go to bed early so I watch too many shows. But I watch all these shows about like guys leaving and they they have a fresh start and they go move somewhere and they know no one and all of a sudden they can start fresh. And I'm like you will never start fresh because the baggage you have in your relationships now you're just going to take it with you when you go somewhere else and bring that baggage into your new relationships. And Paul is saying we don't just dispose of these relationships. Instead we fight for them. We move through them and and we fight for relationships, not against them. Paul uh shows us this in verses 4-7. He he talks about all his comfort, his joy, his confidence in them, even though they went through all this conflict. He he was fighting for them. And when someone in your church family hurts you, which they will hurt you cuz you will hurt someone else because we are people. Our first instinct is probably to leave, to gossip, to get revenge. But Paul says we need to work towards reconciliation. He he also shows us that we invest in our relationships, not around them. We don't just tolerate difficult people. We love them. We we don't just show up to church and tolerate it. We show up to church to be the church, to be around other people, to do relationships with another. That then as we get closer, we get closer to our God. And Paul tells us we stick with our relationships, not through them. You see, we don't endure family waiting for something to get better is we choose to thrive in the family that God has placed us. Just this past week, I was talking to a church member and someone who serves faithfully in our church and and and leads in our church. And and one of the things he said, he he he's been here a while. He's seen change. And I I've been here almost a year now where I got to fill the shoes of Pastor Jackie coming from our Phoenix campus that I came from. And and things have changed. Uh some things for the better. I some things for the worse. Some of you like you talk too fast. Maybe you find me annoying. Um I don't know. That's uh not true, right? Okay. you were a little quiet on that. You're like, "How does he know that?" But this is what I love. This is a statement. He said, "Hey, I I understand like leaders will change, things will change." He's like, "But I'll never leave my church family over dumb things just changing as things go." He's like, "Because I'm committed to raising my family with God's people in God's house to do life with them." And too often, I don't think we have that attitude. And Paul is telling us that this whole forever church family, when you come here and you sit on a Sunday morning, when you proclaim Jesus with your mouth, you say, "I'm a Christian. I'm a follower of him." And the people around you say that, these are the people you will spend eternity with. That's either really comforting or you just got really uncomfortable. You're like, I'm going to move a few chairs over. Okay. Um, but this is what Paul is showing us is how do we love that family? How do we grow closer together? And how do we know that it is bigger than our temporary strives? But Paul keeps going because we see this forever family leads to something else. Pick up at verse 11. He says, "For even if I grieved you with my letter, I don't regret it. And if I regretted it, since I saw that the letter grieved you, yet only for a little while, instead of I didn't regret it, he said, for if I did, I now rejoice, not because you were grieved, but because your grief led to repentance, for you were grieved as God willed, so that you didn't experience any loss from us. For godly grief produces repentance that leads to salvation without regret, but worldly grief produces death. Verse 11, for consider how much diligence this very thing, this grieving as God's wills has produced in you. What a desire to clear yourselves. What indignation, what fear, what deep longing, what zeal, what justice. In every way you showed yourselves to be pure in this matter. So even though I wrote to you, it was not because of the one who did wrong or because of the one who was wrong, but because in order that your devotion to us might be made plain to you in the sight of God. For this reason, we have been comforted. In addition to our own comfort, we rejoiced even more over the joy Titus had because the his spirit was refreshed by all of you. As Paul is moving down this journey of giving our checklist of are we rooted in holiness. He says you have to have this forever family that you are planted in that you are doing life with the church that he's given us. But then he also shows us that we have to have a godly grief. Paul kind of shifts gears here and he brings up something that happened between his first letter which is first Corinthians and then this letter 2 Corinthians. And and many believe there's a lost letter and this is one of the references they use that a letter was given to them that was lost and many speculate that it was even harsher than first Corinthians. Uh we studied through first Corinthians and first Corinthians is Paul saying over and over again you guys like need to get your stuff together. You are morons. You are not following Jesus the right way. Like fix it. And 1 Corinthians 1.5 was even harsher than that. And Paul was rebuking them. And Paul was calling them out. And Paul was saying some things in your life had to change. And there's a part of Paul that says he was worried that he might have been too hard on them. It's almost like this parental worry. You ever discipline your kids and your wonder was like was that too extreme? Like we spray our kids with apple cider vinegar in their mouth, right? Like should I have done like one squirt instead of three squirts cuz they kind of deserve three. And and and then they like speak back to you again and be like, "Nope, they deserved every spray of it." Right? It was all worth it. But but Paul is like, I I don't know if I was too hard on them. I don't know if I was too harsh. Like, but then here's what eased his nerves. He got word from Titus about how they responded. And their response was they repented and they changed their behavior. Look, look at verse 9. He says, "I rejoice not because you were grieved, but because your grief led to repentance, for you were grieved as God had willed so that you didn't experience any loss from us." See, Paul is showing us in this kind of the second indicator that we are rooted in holiness is we experience godly sin or godly grief, but we experience this godly grief over our sin. You see, Paul makes a crucial distinction here in verse 10. He he says this godly grief produces a repentance and this repentance leads to our salvation. We are grieved over our sin and we we repent of it and it grows us closer to God. But then he says there's this worldly grief and he says this worldly grief produces death. You think about this for a second and and here's how I think to differentiate these is this worldly grief it feels bad about the consequences that we get because of the choices we make is we feel bad that all of the sudden because we did something sinful we are now having to face the consequences that come as a result. We actually get to see this form of grief in the life of Jesus is Jesus had 12 disciples that followed him around for three years. And in those disciples, they did everything with him. They listened to his teachings. They followed him everywhere he went. He ate with them. He drank with them. He did life with them. And he was teaching them and teaching them. And he was constantly be like, "Hey guys, I'm God." And they're like, "You're what?" He's like, "Hey guys, I'm God." They're like, "You're what?" And like they just didn't get it. But they did night and day, night and day with him. And as they're going, there's one guy by the name of Judas who had this worldly grief. He decided to betray Jesus. That betrayal led to Jesus's death on the cross and leading him to be arrested and and what happened from there. But in that betrayal, we see in that story as Judas had grief after all that. But Judas didn't have grief that he did something wrong and he betrayed God himself. He had grief that all of a sudden he had to face the consequences of that. All of a sudden, his life with Jesus following him was severed and cut off. But the life of who he gave Jesus up to, they mocked him. They made fun of him. They cast him out and thought he was a joke. And all of a sudden, Judas Judas was left with this worldly grief having no place. Suffering for the consequences of his decisions. But then we have this godly grief. Godly grief isn't just being mad about the consequences, but it's having this grief over the sin that we have hurt God and hurt other people. We also see this light in the life of the disciples in the form of Peter. Peter betrayed Jesus. Peter denied Jesus three times. Peter looked like an idiot in front of Jesus and Jesus foretold it and even looked at him after his third mistake. But Peter was grieved and he had this grief that led to repentance that led to him being uh the apostle who preached at Pentecost who started and kicked off the church. You think of this from a parent perspective is there's times when your kids say sorry because they truly did something wrong and then there's the times they say sorry and you're like why are you sorry? They're like I'm sorry I got caught. Like bro, you ain't sorry at all. you're sorry that you're dealing with the consequences and now I'm more mad at you and I'm adding to your punishment. Right? It's like and sometimes we get like that in our life is sometimes we grieve over things because we have to face the consequences because we got caught because our world all of a sudden caught up with our actions and we're not grieving because we have sinned against the savior of the universe. And look at how Paul says when we have this godly grief, how different it is. In verse 11, he says, "This godly grief, it produces diligence. We become more careful about our choices. It produces eagerness. We want to make things right and restore. It produces healthy fear as we start taking our sin seriously as we go forward. It produces longing as we desire to restore our relationship with God and other people. But it also produces zeal as we become passionate about righteousness. That was an amen. All right. In the form of a phone. You know, it sounds morbid, but um outside of being able to preach on Sundays, uh one of the jobs and things that you get speaking engagements for as a pastor is weddings and funerals. You want to take a guess at which one I would rather do? Someone said weddings wrong. Okay. One reason is at a funeral there's no mother of the bride. All right, it's fantastic. Um, weddings are long. You got to do premarital counseling. They ignore half of it as you're doing premarital counseling for four weeks or they don't do the homework. And I'm like, I don't even know if I should marry you guys. Like, get out. Um, and there's all that process. Then the the wedding's a huge party and it's all this and it's long and blah blah blah. Um, if I'm actually going to marry possibly some couples in here uh that I've already talked to, but so ignore all that. Um, but here's why. And there's that's the morbid reasons and and probably the prideful reasons, sometimes the sinful reasons behind that. But here's why I actually love preaching funerals more than doing a wedding. Because when you preach a funeral, you have people who are grieving. You have people who have experience grief. And when you preach the gospel, when you you highlight how the gospel was lived through someone life or how it wasn't lived through someone's life, at the end all of a sudden you get people introspectively thinking and grieving and wondering does something need to change in my life. And a lot of times there's this godly grief that comes up in those moments of saying what I'm doing is not right. I need to change it. And when they change it, when they latch on to that, when all of a sudden it leads to this repentance that, as Paul says, leads to salvation. You see, Paul is showing us that if we're going to be rooted in holiness, we need to have this forever family, a church family that we lean on, that we depend on, that is with us in the hard times. We need to have a godly grief that is pushing us in the right direction. But he continues on in verse 14 to close out this chapter. He says,"For if I have made any boast to him about you, I have not been disappointed. But as I have spoken everything to you in truth, so our boasting to Titus has also turned out to be truth. And his affection toward you is even greater as he remembers the obedience of all of you and how you received him with fear and trembling." In verse 16, I love this as Paul is setting all this up of how faithful this relationships has become between the church at Corenth and Titus and Paul and the church at Corenth. And in verse 16, he he does this beautiful verse is so small, but he says, "I rejoice." The way we rejoice today, when we have joy, when we praise, when we worship our God, he says, "I rejoice that I have complete confidence in you." You see, we're rooted in holiness when we have a forever family, when we have a godly grief, and lastly, when we have a complete confidence. You see, Paul wraps up this chapter by talking about his confidence in the Corinthian church. But but just think about this for a second. He he spent two letters before this talking about how this church is doing everything wrong and they need to clean up their act. He spent six chapters before this continually correcting them that they're still doing some things wrong and they need to knock it off and they need to stop it. And then he says in the middle of this, I have complete confidence in you. I'm like, Paul, do you have confidence in them? Cuz I'm pretty sure two and a half letters just proved you do not have confidence in them. But what he has confidence in is not their ability, not not their uh structure, not in the fact that they are going to be perfect people from here on out. He has confidence in the work of God. First, he's confident in their faithfulness. Paul says in verse 14, "I have not been disappointed." He said, even when the Corinthians were struggling, Paul's confidence in God's plan, it never wavered. He had confidence by God's process. He talks about how Titus was encouraged that despite how messy their relationship had come is he trusted the process that Titus is going to go back and forth and all of a sudden you guys are going to get it. You guys are going to understand it. We're going to see forward progress. And ultimately it led to a confidence in God's people. He says I rejoice that I have complete confidence in you and this isn't a naive optimism. This is a gospel rooted confidence that God finishes what he starts. Recently, my youngest daughter, Alice, she she's a about one and a half and she thinks it's been fun to climb on chairs and furniture. She's one and a half and and it's superhero day today, so you see Spider-Man swinging around. She's been inspired by Spider-Man lately and she thinks she can climb anything. And she's been climbing chairs that lead to climbing on the table and we're terrified. And then this past week, she's like, I can do better. I can climb on a bar stool and then get onto the counter. And she's been trying that. And when she climbs, I have no confidence she's not going to die. Okay. I'm like, you are a fragile little baby. Like, I I kind of want her to fall some, but not like fall and break anything cuz I don't want to pay for an emergency room visit. But if you can like fall and just get bruises and not bleed everywhere, that'd be great. Um, learn learn some boundaries right in there. But but I have no confidence in her little ability to be able to navigate these things on her own. Paul had no ability or had no confidence in the ability of the church at Corenth to be able to go through the spiritual hardships they would on their own. But he had confidence that God's plan was sovereign. Confident that God knew what he was doing. Confident that God would ultimately provide. He would work through and he would move through this church despite them being made up of broken people, imperfect people trying to fulfill the word of God. And as we begin to reflect on this, we see the message that Paul has for us that we are not a perfect church. If you came here for the first time, you were hoping for a perfect church, I'm sorry to disappoint you. If you were hoping that everyone would be friendly and nice and smile all the time and it's like coming into Whoville and we're going to sing even when our tree gets stolen. Uh just came to me. I don't know why. It's way too early for a Christmas um reference, but it just happened. Okay, you're going to be disappointed because God worked through broken people to make up a broken church to fulfill his kingdom work. And as we've studied all through these first seven chapters and as we talk about like how do I know I've arrived? How do I know I'm qualified? How do I know I'm rooted in the right things? How do I know I'm moving in the right direction? Here is the reflection that I want us to take to our heart. This holy reflection that as we talk about being rooted in holiness, we ask ourselves this question honestly is are you rooted so that you can be ready for what God does next? Are you rooted in the holiness of God? Not under your own ability, not under your own power. Are you rooted? And here's your signs. Do you have a family around you? A church family that is going to be with you forever. If you don't know if you have that family, we want you to be your family. Come join us after pizza with the pastor. We talk about the practical ways we are that family is you have a forever family. When you go through trials and hardships, the grief that comes, what does that godly grief lead to? Does it lead you to getting closer to God or pushing farther away? Do you grieve your sin so that it breaks your heart and it brings you to him? Or are you just sad that your life is the result of the consequences you have made? And do you have a complete confidence not in yourself but in what God can do through you and God can do through his church. This past week we mentioned we've had a bunch of storms and they've been weird storms. We've had like pretty much no rain. I think it rained at my house for 5 minutes and I looked at the temperature and it was still 110. So, I don't know if that it might have just like midair turned to dust, but but we didn't really have rain. We had weird storms. But here's what we did have is we had a lot of dust, really strong winds, crazy lightning, and it was like a monsoon without the rain. And here's what I found out as a native Phoenician. Whenever we get monsoons, what happens is you start driving around the next day and what do you see? You see trees all over the ground. They're blown over here, blown over there. And what's funny is those trees that usually blow down, the most popular one that you might have at your house is a palvery tree. And the funny thing about a palvery tree is actually a native desert plant. But here's what we do. When the suburbs and you go out to the desert after a monsoon, you don't see those same trees on the ground. But when we drive around in Surprise and in Festival and Verado and in Poria and everywhere else and we see these trees on the ground, what we do with those plants is we give them a lot of water. So they grow real fast and they grow really fast and they look really nice and they look beautiful and they look great and everything's awesome on the outside, but their roots, even though they're 15t high, are only about a foot deep. So when the storm comes, when the trials hit, that thing just blows right over. But you go in the desert where those things don't get water. They're not 15 ft high. They might be about 5 ft high, but those roots are about 15 ft in the ground cuz they're just searching for any drop of water they can get. When the storm comes, when the wind blows, when the dust hits, they don't move. They just waver and they're still there because their roots are rooted in the right stuff. Are seeking the nourishment for what gives them meaning and what makes them complete spiritually. We do the same thing all the time. We water our lives with garbage, with stuff around us to flood us, to make it look like we're flourishing, to make it look like we have it all set, to make it look like our lives are successful in every way. But as soon as the storm hits, it blows us down just like that, palverie. because we are rooted in maybe our selfishness and our ability and our jealousy and our pride and whatever sin you have in your life. But God's word calls us to be rooted in the holiness of him. To have that church family, to have that God we can lean on through the trials to produce the right grace and to have confidence in what God has done on our behalf and not what we can do for ourselves. And you go back at the beginning of this chapter to verse one. Paul says that the reason we can bring this holiness to completion is because we have these promises. These promises that even though we are sinful and broken, God sent his son, fully man, fully God in the form of Jesus Christ here to earth. He had his promises and this truth of his word that he lived a perfect life, that he never made a mistake, that he never he never stubbed his toe like we do. He never sinned. Instead, he was fully God perfect. That he taught about himself. That he healed people. That he loved people. That he pointed them to the truth of who he was. So that when he died in a on the cross in our place, we we could have our sins taken by him, he would be raised again to defeat those sins so that we can have confidence in that promise. We can be rooted in the holiness, not of our own lives, but in the holiness of Jesus Christ, and our life can be forever changed. I'll ask it again. Are you rooted in the right stuff? Are you rooted in your sin? Are you rooted in your confidence? Are you rooted in what culture says you need to be rooted in? Or are you rooted in the holiness of God and ready for whatever God brings next? [Music]