They are living and active and supernaturally supercharged to take this church where it has not yet dreamed - in ways we have not yet dreamed. They don’t just sustain the present and explain the past. The reason this seems like the way to launch rather than land, to pursue preparation rather than pondering consummation, and to lay hold on the greater things to come rather lingering over the great things of the past, is that these foundational realities that I want to talk about are wildly untamable, explosively uncontainable, and electrically future-creating. Therefore, it has seemed good to me, with the encouragement of the pastoral staff, not to simply try to get through another couple chapters of the Gospel of John and leave it dangling anyway at chapter 17, but rather to turn our attention to a battery of foundational realities - defining truths, thirty-year trademarks, biblical touchstones - that have profoundly shaped what Bethlehem is for these last three decades. It is less about the great things God has done, and more about the greater things God is going to do. Or to put it another way, I hope to help you see and feel that this transition between me and Jason Meyer is less about landing and more about launching. Under that overarching aim, my goal is to awaken and strengthen a strong conviction in you that the last thirty years of ministry here have been preparation not consummation. In other words, I aim to make so much of God the Father and God the Son through God the Spirit that you - and thousands through you - will be moved to join me in glad adoration of our triune God. In the ten messages that I will, Lord willing, be giving between now and the end of the year, my ultimate goal is to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples through Jesus Christ. Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I Am Who I Am.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I Am has sent me to you.’” God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and thus I Am to be remembered throughout all generations.” (Exodus 3:13–15)
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