For our worship team, just leading us into Mess, just what a wonderful week. Thanksgiving week. I hope you had a great time with your family and friends or wherever you were. Glad you make it back home safe. For everyone watching online today, welcome. We're glad you're here. There's just such a sweet presence of the Lord in this room. And uh I was thinking as we're just, you know, just kind of basking in this moment of how good God is, how grateful we are, how our hearts are overflowing with thanksgiving and just the chance to be together. And then we have this beautiful snowfall. It's like the first, the first snowfall is always the best snowfall. And then the last snowfall is always even better because then you're like, it's done. But listen, I I just I don't know about you, but I just feel like, you know, whatever your week was like getting to the holiday, and then however, you know, the holiday played out for you, whether it was enjoyable or you know, kind of crazy, or a little bit of like stressor, uh having everybody around the house. And but I don't know, I just felt like coming into the presence of the Lord today just seemed so extra sweet to me. And just like, I don't know, I I was like, I was just standing there thinking, God, I didn't even know I needed this moment as much as you knew I needed it, and that you would keep your promise that when people gather and lift up your name, that you would just saturate the place with your presence. And and honestly, like just one second in God's presence, it changes everything. It we're just in this this season of I first of all, I can't believe it's the last Sunday of November, and we've got 31 days left of 2025, our best year ever, but I mean, best year ever. And uh I can't believe we're standing at this moment, but I'm so grateful. My heart's so overflowing. So just for a second, can you just lift your hands again and just be thankful for how good God is and express some gratitude to Him. Just use your voice to be thankful, overflowing our heart full of thanks and praises, and just so thankful for God's goodness in my life. Lord, we thank you. Well, it's a busy week heading into this week. It is our uh Giving Tuesday's coming up, and excited about advancing the vision of the church forward in one powerful way and one powerful day. And um, I'm making sure he's not bringing that mic because I changed my mind. And so we're excited for that. I'm gonna preach into that today, and then we're gonna launch a brand new series next week entitled Throwback Christmas. And we're gonna take it back uh back to some of our favorite toys for generation before us, and um, it's gonna be so much fun. It's gonna be a great season. And then Family Christmas on the 14th of December, we've got invite cards down in the lobby. Encourage you to take a handful, invite your family, your extended family and friends, invite people that are close to you, but maybe far from God. As our team puts together this incredible journey of the Christmas story with music and the choir and special kids' choir singing with us, and it's gonna be a great day. Um, just so much fun. One of our funnest days as we have all kinds of things happening in the lobby and on the patio. And let me just give a shout out to the men and women of the church that served to get Sunday ready. And you know, some of you don't think about it, but like the the sidewalks and the patio have to be shoveled. And I'm just so thankful for the guys that showed up yesterday. Morris came and shoveled yesterday. Brother Burt came and spent some time up here. Marco, and I'm sure there are others, but man, got it looking good for us and safe so we could be here. And uh, what a blessing. I pray blessings on your families for those guys and for all of you that served to make Sunday happen. Well, listen, I'm ready to preach God's word. Are you ready to receive it today? The year was 2003, and uh we were living in Houston at the time. I changed my mind. We were living in Houston at the time, and we uh we had um we had gotten a new CPA to file taxes for us, and uh he was not just a CPA, he was a miracle worker, and uh we were not used to getting uh money back from the IRS by the way that our salary is is is constructed and uh organized. And so, but man, he made magic and followed all the rules to a T and got us an incredible tax return. And I'll never forget, we got the check, and I was looking at this check, and I'm like, wow, this is this is a blessing, this is an increase. And Rashawn and I started talking about all the things we would do with it. We'll pay off some bills, we might travel, we might save some, we might take care of the kids, take them on vacation. We were just talking about all the things, and I said, Well, the thing is we probably should and I think she asked me, she's like, Do we should we tithe on this? And I was like, Well, we tithe on the gross of our salary, so we've actually already tithed on this, but it is increase. And Proverbs three and nine says, honor the Lord with your wealth and uh give him the first fruits of your increase. And I said, So what we're holding here is is increase, it's it's something God's given us, it's it's a return for something, and it's increase. So I think we definitely should give to it. And so we sat down and we we talked about how much we'd give to the church, and then we wanted to sew into the men, the pastors that were leading us, and so we sewed into a couple of our pastors, and one from out of state, and another from out of state, and we just felt like the Lord had put them on our heart. They had invested so much in us as they as they led us, and so we sewed into them, and uh, so we did that, and we did that with joy. It was it was kind of exciting writing those checks. Like this was kind of it was fun to give, and so we gave, and then we made plans for what we would do with the rest of that uh increase. And then uh, like a week later, there was an envelope in our mailbox, and I and I didn't recognize the address, it had a weird address on it, and I thought, what is this is weird, and so and in Houston, your mailbox is not like at your house, it's like down at the end of the block with everybody else's mailbox, so you don't usually go to your mailbox every day because you're like, I don't want to go down there, it's I would get my mail at my house, but it's down at the end of the street. So I go down there, it'd been a few days, and so I pull all the mail out, and I would see this envelope, and I open it, and it was a check for just slightly more than what we had given up out and around to bless from our increase. And it's really the year that I learned that you reap where you sow, and when you sow, you can always expect an abundant harvest beyond anything that you did expect. And I just want to just encourage you today as we prepare for Giving Tuesday, that if if what you have in your hand is not enough to be the harvest of your life, consider it to be seed. And if you have increase in your life, when you give of your increase, honor the Lord with your wealth and give of your the first fruits of your increase. You'll never, my dad used to always say, you cannot outgive God. So turn to your neighbor and say, You can't outgive God. And the other one you ignored uh for a second, just look back and say, it looks like you enjoyed Thanksgiving. Oh, I mean, because you look happy. I'm sorry. It looked like I meant to say you have a joyful thing. It looked like you had a joyful Thanksgiving. That's what I had a joyful Thanksgiving. Well, here we are. We are at the close of this series, increase, part four, and um, I want to just declare to you that this is not an end of a series, but it's a beginning of a season, a season of suddenlies, a season of increase, a season of overflow, and I believe that God is really moving powerfully in our midst, and and I want to prepare you to have testimony, to have a way to talk about what God is doing. And I think I said it a couple weeks ago. We used to have testimony service in service when I was a kid, and and something about the power of declaring what God is doing in you, because we overcome by the blood of the Lamb and by our testimony. And so I want to just encourage you to be ready and to be expectant in this season as we close out the year. And remember, week one, uh, we talked about that it is our job, it's our responsibility to plow the ground, to prepare the ground of our heart and our lives, so that when God sends the rain into our lives, which brings uh life to the crops, when he sends the rain, it it's our lives are ready to receive that rain. And so God softens what was hard, he awakens what looked dormant, and he stirs what winter looked to kill. And I'm gonna tell you that when we prepare our heart, God sends the rain and it begins the production process of increase in our life. Part two, Pastor Robbie preached and we talked about how God uh removes the clods, he softens the ground uh with the rain, but we remove the rocks. That when you plow the ground, the process of plowing raises rocks to the very top. And you've got to get rid of those rocks because rocks are what will choke out the word or the seed or the harvest in your life if you have these rocks. And what would these rocks be? They might be old habits, uh, they might be old hurts, they could be old sin patterns that you just have not laid down because it's just it's an easy habit to stick close to, and and that's a rock in your life that needs to be removed. It might be, it might be thought processes, it might be, you know, the areas that we've got to let God level what life has warped, and we need to make space for blessing instead of washing away. So that was week two. Week three, we talked, this was last week, and we talked about how we need to prepare to plant seed. Don't eat the seed. Enjoy the fruit, but don't eat the seed. How everything in life God establishes and He allows a seed to be produced of what He gives you. And a seed may be small in your hand, but the harvest is large in God's hand. That a seed may be small or insignificant as you look at it or think about it, but it announces the arrival of something greater. That when we plant in faith, we believe in the future God has for us, and we sow what we have yet to see. That's what we're sowing for. We sow for something we have not yet seen. When we throw that seed in the ground, we believe, we have faith in the seed because there's power in the seed. We believe in the future that that field will be ripe with harvest soon, and we sow for what we haven't seen yet. We want to see the field full of increase. And then that brings us to week four this week, and we're gonna talk about this this phrase uh that God blesses the abundant crops. Look at our key verse, Psalm 65 and 10. And it says this you, and this is God drenches the plowed ground with rain, melting the clods and leveling the ridges. You soften the earth with showers and bless its abundant crops. So the divine partnership I talked about last week, that we do our part and what we do what we can so God can do what we cannot. And that gap is the space that creates the miraculous and the increase in our life. Amen. You with me? You with me? So so we are gonna spend time then in this this little moment that I have with you, this is part four of this series, the closeout of the series, and this is it. This is the thought. Don't stand next to the harvest, step into it. There's a lot of people that deal differently with harvest. Some people they they dream about the harvest. There are some people that look at the field and wow, they admire the harvest. And then there are those of us that pick up the sickle and we go get the harvest. In church, we are a church that goes out and gets the harvest. We we prepared for it. We prepared the ground for this harvest. We removed the rocks to be ready for the harvest. We planted the seeds so that we could have a harvest, and now that the harvest is arriving, we're gonna go get that harvest. And we're not gonna be ashamed about it, we're not gonna be shy about it because we know God did what he could do for us once we did what we could do. We don't have to be ashamed that God is blessing our life. In fact, you can brag on God. I was reading this morning in my daily reading, and I've got 31 days left to close out another year of reading the Bible through chronologically, and I'm in the book of Corinthians. Actually, what I preached last week, 1 Corinthians 8 and 1 Corinthians 9 and 1 Corinthians 10, and Paul's writing to the Corinth church, and he says this he says, I don't boast for the sake of building myself up. I boast to declare how good God is. So when God's blessing you, when he favors your life, when he puts in you something that's greater than you expected, it's okay to boast. Not on yourself, but in God. Brag on God and see what happens. Around Thanksgiving this week, we were closed out the day, and it was the end of the evening, and the boys were sitting around the living room, and one of them's like, hey, we didn't really spend a lot of time talking about what we're grateful for. And we just kind of smashed the food and went back to watching football. And so, and so we said, Well, let's close out the night. And just to hear them be thankful and grateful for the house they live in, for the family, the the the way they they're not just family, they're friends. They're the boys, they're not just brothers, they they're they choose to be best friends, and then the blessing of where they're at in life and the way they're flourishing in life. So we shared that moment of gratefulness. Listen, I was I'm like, I wanted to boast about how good God is in my life, and that's what we were doing. And listen, I'm gonna tell you it's okay to boast on God. This is a church that is a harvest church. We are not a storage church, we are not a survival church, we are not just enough church, but we are a kingdom-building church. We exist to see increase, an increase in salvations, an increase in disciples, an increase in leaders, an increase in influence, an increase in impact, an increase in souls rescued, an increase in lives transformed, an increase in families brought together. I was thinking about this this week. We we our team, Samantha Smith, led an incredible outreach this week through our Servant Heart Collective small group, and they they delivered 50 Thanksgiving meals. And as they were preparing, then they they were loading all the meals on a bus to take it to the delivery point to meet the families, and and I and I expressed, I wanted to pray over those meals, and it hit me that this meal was gonna provide sustenance to the family. But I was like, God, beyond the physical blessing, let this meal be a spiritual blessing. Let it be a blessing of increase for these families, and may these families, as they partake in this meal, be transformed in their lives so that next year they might be a part of extending a meal to somebody else through increase. I was thinking, uh, you know, a few houses ago we lived and the fence line was was such that, and then our side of the house, because we have dogs, the fence line is usually run pretty bare. Because the dog runs in the same spot all day, every day, same spot, back and forth on the fence line, as if something's gonna come under the fence or over the fence, just hoping some squirrel, rabbit, bird would make the mistake of coming on our side of the fence, and we tell them when we see them, go away. This is a dog yard, you don't want to be in here, but they don't listen always. And so a lot of times, right along that spot that's run, there's no, there's, it's just the ground. But sometimes, because the harvest and the nurturing and the care on the other side of the fence, some of those flowers and plants will come up on our side of the fence. And I just started to think about that. When we plant and we sow seeds, we can expect the increase to be so bountiful that it stretches beyond our borders. Come on, somebody. That's why the Lord declared, you're gonna take a harvest where you did not sow. It's because as we all sow together, there's an overflow that's happening that we get to be a part of. So, so here we go. Let's let's lean in and um let's let's take this moment. We talked about last week you have to have the faith to plant what's in your hand. You have to have the expectation to believe what's in God's hand is greater than what's in your hand. And the only way we get a part of what's in God's hand is we let go of what's in our hand. So don't step, don't stand next to the harvest, step into it. And then and then let me just spend this last minute here. This is what I love. We've we spent this whole month in Psalm 65, 10. You drench, you drench the ground, you prepare, you soak the ground, you you you you remove the clods, you level the ridges, you bless the abundant crops. But you know what? Psalm 65 doesn't stop in verse 10. There's a verse 11. And look at a verse 11. It says, You crown the year with a bountiful harvest, even the hard pathways overflow with abundance. The same God that drenched the ground is the God that crowns the year. And I just I just had this vision and this capacity within me to believe God that what we started as our best year ever, in declaration, in faith, in believing, in expectation, as we sow this week on Giving Tuesday, God's gonna crown the year with a bountiful harvest in our life. You thought it was good up until now, it's about to get even better. It's about to get even more increased in our life, more crazy, you might say, because God is about to do what he promised, and he's gonna crown the year with a bountiful harvest. And just so you know, this is not just an idea or conjecture, this is scripture. And as I was preparing this week, I thought about the story of Solomon. Solomon was given the privilege and opportunity to build the temple. Up until that point, the temple of God had been a temporary space, it had been moved from space to pace. Now we've been a temporary church. We've we've loaded a trailer and unloaded a trailer. We did that for two and a half years, and then when we moved to the school for uh another 18 months, we would set up every Saturday and tear it all down and put it back up on Saturday and tear it down after Sunday. We've been, and when we first moved in here, we had to set the stage and strike the stage every week because there were other things happening. And but praise be to God, we have our own space. And I started to think about Solomon. When you read through the early chapters of 1 Kings, you read that around Solomon, the people gave sacrificially to build the temple. When he cast the vision that it's time to build, the people gave sacrificially. And then they built the temple. And as you read the story of it, I only can picture it in my mind, but it was it was the greatest building ever built in that time frame, in that period. I wish it was like this building opened in 1916. And the architecture and and the way it's built, they're not gonna build this building ever like this again. But man, what beautiful architecture! And so that that temple was beautiful, and so they built it, and it was magic, majestic, and it was the greatest thing anybody had ever seen. And then after they built it, they dedicated it. And the Bible says when they dedicated the temple, the glory of the Lord fell in such a way that people couldn't even stand. It was so powerful, the presence of God in his house. And we say it every week: Whose house? Whose house? Whose house? His house? That's what you miss when you miss Team Rally. And so the glory of the Lord fell because now he has a permanent home. But then, after the glory fell, then came increase. And when you read about the increase Solomon experienced and the nation of Israel experienced, in chapter 10, it literally says silver was as common as stone. I don't know about you, but that's the kind of increase I'm looking for. The increase where it's just common. It's common for me to be able to bless the people around me. It's common for me to be able to extend and generously give to those in need. It's common for me to be able to not even think about it, but to give the best tip somebody's received that whole week. It's common for us to live in abundance because God's blessing in such a way because we prepared, we sowed, we built, we blessed, we the glory fell, and then we get to experience the increase. So, how does that apply to us, the story of Solomon? When God's people sow into God's house, God not only blesses in his house, he blesses in your house. When God's people are genuine, generous, God is always extravagant. When we give sacrificially, God blesses supernaturally. When we build God's house, God builds our house. Stronger, fuller, richer, and overflowing. When we prepare the ground, God crowns the year. So on Tuesday, we're gonna wake up and we're gonna look for that portfolio that was sent from Renee. Hopefully you've seen it by now. It's been sent a couple of different ways. One, it came through church news. And then on Thanksgiving Day, I sent a little Thanksgiving note with the portfolio in there telling you of some of the things we want to do. We're gonna launch Spanish translation in here. We're going to finish out the lower level for our kids to have world-class space with actual walls so that you might still hear them, but you won't hear them as loudly when you're down there. We want to hear our kids, actually. We really do. So our students have space down there. We're gonna partner with Young Life and expand the reach and the team serving our high school. Because, hey, church, when this church experiences increase, it should flow into the ground of the high school behind us. Furthermore, I think these properties around us, the church across the street, the apartment buildings, the church down the street, the apartment buildings and townhomes behind us, I think as we experience increase, they should experience increase. The Bible says, when the righteous prosper, the whole city prospers. So we're gonna wake up, we're gonna look for that QR code on the back of that portfolio. And if you don't have it, it's in today's notes. And we're just gonna scan that QR code and we're gonna give generously, sacrificially, not at equal gifts, but equal sacrifice. Because when we sow, God multiplies. When we give, God increases. When we plant, God fills the carts until they overflow. It's not just a fundraiser, it's a faith raiser, it's a kingdom builder. And I'm so excited to see what God will do because we're gonna get the projects done. Somehow, some way. We'll find a way to do it. We get tenacious like that, but I am so excited to see what God does in your house as you sow generously. How God heals your house, fills your house, establishes your house, causes your house to increase to overflowing. And I was so thankful for your even to put the time into it, to think about it, to pray about it. Some of you have already given, already sacrificially towards giving Tuesday. You could even wait till Tuesday. You're like, I'm in it, I'm ready. I just pray God bless you with increase. Can you receive that word today? Let me pray for you.