The Power of Alignment

But we've spent a lot of spiritual time over not just the last week, but even beyond that, the last month, maybe the last six weeks. For some of you wives who start gathering the 11 products and putting them in certain places of your house so they can be used, it might have been about three months now that you've been working on towards these holy days. We've spent a lot of time looking at Scripture. You've heard a lot of different messages shared, sermons. Appreciate all the work that all of our different speakers have put into this and the different congregations.

Bringing a focus on what do these days mean? Why is there so much significance in Passover?

What is it that God wants us to examine and to consider? I hope that this has been a time of revelation for you. I hope it's been a time of growth. I hope it's been a time where we've considered where we're at and where God wants us to continue to go, just like the messages we've heard today. This has been on the forefront of our minds even this past week, as we kept these days and we worked not to eat the pizza at work. For all... see, those from Flint, you guys already know you're weird. Those in Ann Arbor, Detroit, you did not get my weird sermon, so you don't understand it. But we didn't eat... if you had a pizza party this week at work, you probably didn't eat the pizza. Co-workers brought in donuts this week. You probably said no to the donuts.

This is what we did this week. We actively looked for the leaven. The trickiest place is when you go to the grocery store and you've got your list of things that you need to grab and I'm going to get this and this, and then all of a sudden you see what on sale? I don't know, name it. Something that we shouldn't be eating this week. And you're like, oh, it's on sale, finally! They never put it on sale this week. Of course they don't. That's the whole point. They don't put the donuts, they don't put the bagels or something that you just love. That particular item is never on sale.

Except for when you can't have it, right? Hopefully we were able to keep that on the forefront of our minds and to keep leaven out of our lives as we took in this week the bread of life, Jesus Christ. As we close out these days, I want to go back to a passage that maybe we've looked at already in 1 Corinthians chapter 11. I want to kind of just set the stage again.

1 Corinthians 11 and verse 17. I know we read through this often, parts of this, in preparation of these days. We read through it at the Passover, certain elements of this.

But I want to go through and I want to read kind of more of the overall passage of this chapter.

Paul is writing a letter to the church in Corinth, and they've got some challenges.

Some things that I can't imagine how hard it would be to be a pastor overseeing this congregation and to feel moved by God that there's correction that needs to take place. There's something that needs to be pointed out that they're doing wrong. And you can't hold punches. You can't sugarcoat it. You just kind of lay it out as it is and hope that God's spirit will work in the people who are there and that they'll understand the approach and the heart behind it. But Paul opens up here in 1 Corinthians 11 verse 17, he says, now in giving the instructions, I do not praise you, since you come together not for the better, but for the worse. I mean, that's hard as a pastor.

That would be hard for me to stand before you if I was legitimately talking and speaking to you.

He says, for first of all, when you come together as a church, I hear that there's divisions among you, and in part, I believe it. And so issues like we sometimes face, they were facing themselves.

And in verse 20, he says, therefore, when you come together in one place, is it not to eat the Lord's supper? For in eating, one takes his own supper ahead of others, and one is hungry, and another is drunk. He says, what? Do you not have houses to eat in or to drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and shame those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you in this?

I do not praise you. There were problems. People would come together to share a meal, and those who had rich, a lot of food and could afford wine and filet mignon, they would bring it, and they were eating it, and they were indulging in it. But yet, the poorer of the family, the poorer of the members, if they had their peanut butter and jelly sandwich, that's all they had. They brought it, they ate it, but nobody, the rich, the ones who had abundance, they weren't sharing it.

They were just enjoying their side of the room where others like them could enjoy the finer things like they had. Paul goes on to say in verse 27, bringing the focus back to what we've done this week, and these days, and of course, referencing Passover, he says, therefore, whoever eats this bread and drinks this cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and the blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup, for he who eats and drinks in an unworthy manner eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the Lord's body.

And then we'll finish in verse 31. He says, for if we would judge ourselves, we would not be judged. Again, the early church obviously had some problems. They had some challenges that they were going through, and Paul was made aware of these issues and was moved by God's Spirit to address it.

And he spoke because they needed help in their alignment with God. Their alignment was off. Their alignment was crooked. Their alignment was not straight, and it wasn't paired up and going in parallel with their Lord and their Savior. Many of our jobs and our tasks in life involve a key concept and practice of alignment. In my previous employment, when I worked in IT, I was a data analyst. We had a lot of procedures. I worked with database back-ends, and we would write code to pull data out that we would then use for analysis or pass it on to different clients for their purposes.

And I can't count the number of times that I'm staring at code, pulling data out, and comparing it against the results and questioning, is this right? Is this what it should be? Numbers look a little bit off. Did I mess anything up? And there's so many times that I would start to overthink it and start to recode my code only to realize, Mike, it was fine the first time you're overthinking it. But this is a process that we would go through, and occasionally we would find errors in the code.

We would be sending too much data or wrong data, and then we'd have to refine our code, because the point of the code was we would run it the same way every single time so that we get the same results, right? It's consistency. And so we want this code to be as close to accurate, and we want it to be completely accurate, so that the data that we're sending out is good data.

I know we have some engineers in the room, and you test a lot of your work on a daily basis. I think engineers probably test more in their careers than a lot of other, I mean, you probably got scientists, you've got different types of engineers, chemical engineers, all these different engineers, these scientists, these people with these careers, that they spend probably the majority of their time testing, testing, testing, and making sure that the results are correct, whether it's making an auto part or whether it's, again, doing data analytics.

It's a lot of testing, it's a lot of examination along the way. Others with specialized careers calibrate tools, especially those used for measuring items, right? For some of us, I can look around the room, and I know that you work either in the automotive industry, or you make parts, or you manufacture things.

There's a lot of measuring going on to make sure the final product coming out is staying in the tolerance as it's supposed to, and that sometimes that tolerance is extremely tight, and so you can't have a calibration tool that's out of whack, or you're going to be making parts that then don't fit down the road, and you may be making thousands of these parts before somebody finally catches it that it's not fitting right, and so there's a lot of analysis that goes into a lot of testing, a lot of realignment that goes in.

I was speaking, I've talked to John Kaczmalski a lot of times about his previous careers, retired, but still very much in the industry, but he created and invented a measuring device that helps the mowers on golf courses measure and cut the golf courses at a certain height. Those of you who golf and you get out there on a regular basis, and you know the greens are a certain height, the tee boxes are a certain height, the fairways are another height, the rough where I'm usually at is another height, but yet when you play that whole course, and often when you go to another course, they're very, very similar in their cuts, and it's amazing the tooling that goes into it, and his company would make a device that the golf courses could put on their mowers and measure how close their mowers were getting to the ground, and so they could be in the right specs.

But what happens if his tool gets out of alignment? Well, then all the golf courses or that golf course, when they're using that tool to measure their the cuts for their mowers, now they're all off. And so during the off season, I think, I don't know when you were busier, off season or during the season? The off season, the repair site, because often these golf courses would send these measuring devices back to Mr. Kuzmalski, and they would say, can you check that it's in the right tolerance? Can you make sure it's still working the way it should? So he would examine it, his team would look at it, and if they found that one of their measuring devices wasn't working right, then they would replace the parts on it that were not correct.

Or maybe the whole thing would have to be replaced, and they'd send them a brand new one that was back in to the specs it needed to be. But again, a lot of refinement, a lot of going back and aligning things. And back onto my level a little bit, with the mower that I have, I try to get out there and sharpen the blade every single year on my mower, because I'll get a better cut in the yard.

The mower will work better. Hopefully less disease will come into the yard. But that's a process that we go through.

We look at things. We examine. I don't know if you're into spacecraft or NASA, but this past week has been a really interesting adventure for NASA and for astronauts going back to the moon and circumventing the moon again. But what I thought was probably a pretty straightforward task, this is me thinking right, I'm a pastor, looking at the mathematics and the involvement and all the moving pieces. And it's just, there's a movie where somebody talks about how the math was impossible, that they looked to try to make like a time machine, but the math was impossible.

I think the math of sending someone in a spacecraft around the moon is right up there with impossibility. Laura and I were curious just on some of the different details of speed and miles.

And so we, I started googling it. Did you know that we're moving through space on this planet at 67,000 miles an hour? And that's not a misprint, that's not a, I didn't read my notes, 67. We're going through space right now on a planet that is moving 67,000 miles an hour.

We're rotating at about a thousand miles an hour, too, while we're doing that. So make sure you're hanging onto your seats, because it could get a little rough here. The moon is over 200,000 miles away from the earth, so it's out there. 200,000 miles, that's ridiculous to me, so I had to break it down. To drive from here to Panama City Beach for the feast is about a thousand miles, so a round trip would be about 2,000 miles. So the moon is about, what is that, 100 trips to Florida and back? So if you want to get in your car and start driving to Panama City and then back, do that 100 times. That's the distance the moon is from us right now.

The moon is also moving not only at 67,000 miles an hour, because it's staying in place with us, it is spinning around the earth at 2,000 miles an hour. So you've got all of these aspects that the programmers and the engineers, the scientists at NASA are taking into effect and into account as they now shoot four people, and they're on their return home now, out to the moon and to bring them back, and to not only shoot them that direction, but to calculate where we are at in time, where that spacecraft is at in time, and where the moon is at. And what I thought in my head was like, it's like a straight shot, right? But when you look at what they're doing, the moon is actually like way over here, and they've got to send astronauts in a spacecraft that sink up to it right at the right time that then they can do their orbit around, gain momentum, and then have a path back home. Like, that's where I'm like, the math is impossible, right? And yet, they do it pretty well. They do it with without a lot of problems that we that they share with us, or that we find out about. But there's something that they do along the way that they build in, and those are called correction burns. Those are times where their math is off by such a minute decimal that to get the astronauts on their course or back home, or to time up with the moon, sometimes they have to do correction burns. That's where they then calculate, okay, we've got to burn this amount of fuel for this many seconds, and we may have to increase our velocity, or maybe even slow down a little bit. We might have to put the brakes on, or our trajectory could even be off.

And so not only do we have to make a burn, but we have to use certain rockets and certain thrusters to make sure that we get back. What's amazing is after they did their initial burn to go to the moon, they did not need a correction burn. The course was very tight, but I noticed, I think I read last night or yesterday sometime, on their way back they've done one correction burn to straighten themselves up a little bit, make themselves a little bit more accurate on their return home. But alignment is something that happens all the time in most of our lives.

Often we do it without even thinking much about it, except for at this time of the year when we start focusing in on our lives and sin and this examination process that God has invited us along with him to do. And so these days of Unleavened Bread should serve as a season for aligning our lives to be more in tune with God's desire for our lives. And if you like titles for messages, this one's entitled The Power of Alignment. God has promised us an amazing future as his children, but God in his love has established also house rules that are expected for those who will live in his family. So God gives us specific instructions to Paul's and to consider our lives and to say, and to see are we in alignment with him? Because he's held nothing back. We're not short-handed here. He wants to give us the world and everything in it. He wants to not hold anything back from us. And his son paid a tremendous price, as we've heard in the messaging already today. He paid a tremendous price for you and for me. And so God says, I need to know where your heart's at. I need to know what your motivations are for life. I need to know what your focus is. I need to know will you align yourself with me and my son? Because he has a special place in his kingdom for each of us. Let's notice Titus chapter 3 and verse 1.

Paul writes a letter to Titus giving him instructions to pass along to those that he's a pastor of.

And here in Titus 3 and verse 1, he goes down a list of things that we have to be on a regular basis considering about ourselves.

Because this is where we get our degrees of alignment or our degrees of misalignment, where we're not in alignment with God. And we realize, oh, this one needs to be brought into a tighter tolerance. Paul says here in Titus 3 verse 1, remind them, so there's a job that we have to do, and this involves to each other as well, remind them to be subject to the rulers and authorities, to obey and to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to be peaceable, gentle, showing all humility to all men. For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, and hateful and hating one another. But when the kindness and love of our God, our Savior towards man, appeared, not by works of righteousness, which we have done, but according to His mercy, He saved us through the washing of the regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, which He poured out unto us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior. And so we see a type of alignment that we can compare ourselves against. He's saying that having been justified by His grace, we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. This is a faithful saying, and these things I want you to affirm constantly, that those who have believed in God should be careful to maintain good works. Tying into the sermon, we should be careful that fruit is developing in our lives. We should be careful that we're being faithful and going forward, but there's things that need to happen. Faith is one of the critical components of being a Christian, but Paul, James, many others write about these works that should also be there, the behaviors that we have, the things that we do. He says these things are good and profitable. They're good for us. They're helpful to us, to men. And he says, then avoid foolish disputes, genealogies, contentions, and striving about them all, for they are unprofitable and useless. So at this time of the year, we take these, well, all times of the year, but sometimes at this time of the year, we focus in a little bit more on a list like this. And maybe we circle a few of these items. We're like, hmm, I haven't been very peaceable lately. There's something going on inside that I'm not happy about. I need to work on this. We may make a list like this that we just read and make it a priority to focus on one or two or three of those items a little bit more carefully. And we consider the principles that God has given us, and we make adjustments when they're needed in our thoughts and in our actions. And then hopefully we become more in align with God in His way. We know Israel's relationship with God was complicated. It wasn't complicated because something was lacking from God's side of the equation. It was complicated because Israel was lacking, and Israel kept having their own problems creep in. In 2 Chronicles 30, we find a time when a good king helped Israel realign themselves to God. 2 Corinthians, or 2 Chronicles, thank you. I see the C-H in my notes, and I'm like, oh no, it's not Corinthians. 2 Chronicles 30 in verse 1.

So thankful for my family. It wasn't my daughter or my wife. I'm saying thankful that you guys look out for me, too. 2 Chronicles 30 in verse 1. King Hezekiah served a vital role of bringing God's people back to these holy days that we're closing out with today. Time had elapsed. I guess in one sense you could say the holy days were lost. They were not being observed. The priesthood wasn't even fully in place to be able to consecrate the items that needed to be consecrated, the animals that needed to be sacrificed. And when this finally came about, King Hezekiah was moved and said, this has to change. And so 2 Chronicles 30 in verse 1, it says, and Hezekiah sent to all Israel and Judah and also wrote letters to Ephraim and Manasseh that they should come to the house of the Lord at Jerusalem to keep the Passover to the Lord God of Israel. For the kings and his leaders and all the assembly in Jerusalem had agreed to keep the Passover on the second month, for they could not keep it at the regular time because sufficient number of priests had not consecrated themselves, nor had the people gathered together at Jerusalem. And the matter pleased the king and all the assembly. So they resolved to make a proclamation throughout all of Israel from Bar-sheba to Dan that they should come and keep the Passover to the Lord God of Israel at Jerusalem, since they had not done it for a long time in the prescribed manner. Then the runners went throughout all Israel and Judah with the letters from the king and his leaders, and they spoke according to the command of the king. Children of Israel, notice, returned to the Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He could have said, realign yourself to the Lord. Return to the Lord, and he will return to the remnant of you who have escaped from the hands of the king of Assyria. And so, following this message of correction was shared, verse 7, and do not be like your fathers and your brethren who trespassed against the Lord of their fathers, so he gave them up to desolation, as you see.

Now, do not be stiff-necked. This was another issue they were dealing with, as your fathers were, but yield yourselves to the Lord, and enter into his sanctuary, which he has sanctified forever, and serve the Lord your God, that the fierceness of his wrath may turn away from you. For if you return to the Lord, your brethren and your children will be treated with compassion by those who lead them, who led them captive, so that they may come back to this land. For the Lord your God is gracious and merciful, and will not turn his face from you if you return to him. This passage up to this point, I think any of us speakers could have shared in a message leading up here, and we would have changed it around to make it more modern, but we could have said the same exact words in different fashion, and we have, I think, up to this point in the messaging leading up to these holy days, that don't be stiff-necked anymore. Don't hang on to your pride. Don't continue the things of your past, because if you do change, and if you do realign yourself to God, he's merciful. He wants to bring us back. So the messaging that we have shared this festival season and previous years is the same messaging that goes all the way back to Israel. It's the same messaging. It's a different group of people. It's a different time, but God's message hasn't changed. Going on, verse 10, it says, so the runners passed from city to city through the country of Ephraim and Manasseh, as far as Zebulun, but they laughed at them and they mocked them. Nevertheless, though, some from Asher, Manasseh, and Zebulun humbled themselves and came to Jerusalem. And also the hand of God was on Judah to give them singleness of heart to obey the command of the king and of the leaders and at the word of the Lord. God did not force everybody to get into an alignment, and he still doesn't do that today. You can go and you can eat the foods that you wanted this past week. You could skip Holy Day if you wanted. You could continue to read through passages and say, well, that doesn't fit for my life right now. They're not married to the person that I'm married to, and so that's why I have to do what I do. We could continue to do that because, obviously, some mocked Hezekiah's runners, some mocked the messaging that he shared with them, and they didn't show up. They didn't keep Passover. They didn't come and do the things. They didn't evaluate themselves. They didn't come to that merciful God. They didn't realign themselves, but many did.

It says, now many people, a great assembly, gathered in verse 13 in Jerusalem to keep the feast of Unleavened Bread in the second month. So they arose and they took away the altars. They had pagan altars that were up in different cities, and they destroyed them that were in Jerusalem, and they took away all the incense altars and cast them into the brook Kidron. I mean, let's get rid of it. It's got to go. And then they slaughtered the Passover lambs on the 14th day of the second month. The priests and the Levites were ashamed, and they sanctified themselves and brought the burnt offerings to the house of the Lord. And then, after in the few next verses, King Hezekiah prays specifically to God on behalf of the people. And in verse 20, it says, And the Lord listened to Hezekiah and healed the people. So the children of Israel who were present at Jerusalem, cupped the feast of Unleavened Bread seven days with great gladness. And the Levites and the priests praised the Lord day by day, singing to the Lord, accompanied by loud instruments. And Hezekiah gave encouragement to all the Levites who taught the good knowledge of the Lord. And they ate throughout the feast seven days, offering peace offerings and making confession to the Lord, God of their fathers. And then the whole assembly agreed to keep the feast another seven days. And they kept it another seven days with gladness. I think that is in a lot of our hearts. I'm kind of sad that these days are coming to a close. I'd be even sadder if God said, You know how before these days we had to get rid of all of our leaven? If He would say, When these days come unclosed, you've got to get rid of all the unleavened bread and all the snacks and all the special treats. If He said that has to go, I'd be really, really sad right now, because I know we still have a lot left over, and we're going to be enjoying that still in these next weeks. But if God made a proclamation and said, Keep it seven more days, I wouldn't be arguing.

These days are so special. And you get to this point through the self-examination, you get to this point of considering how's my life aligned with God, and then we keep the Passover, and it feels like this weight is just lifted, at least to me, that we made it to another Passover, that we can go through and we can remember the costs that was paid in a loving way and also a willing way for me, each of us individually. And then we get to these days and what they picture and the messaging and the weirdness of foods and things that we can't eat. And our co-workers can't figure us out because you can eat cheese pizza. Well, yeah, I can, but not this week. And then we just confuse them all the more. But this is a blessing to keep these days, and I don't think any of us really sit here and regret or lament the fact that we have done what we've done because of the blessing, just like Israel did when they were able to not only get back to keeping the Feast of Unleavened Bread, but then they said, let's do it another week. Let's rejoice even further because of our merciful God and what He has done for us and the blessings that He has brought into our lives.

Verse 26 says, so there was great joy in Jerusalem, for since the time of Solomon, the son of David, king of Israel, there had been nothing like this in Jerusalem. And then the priests, the Levites, arose and blessed the people, and their voice was heard, and their prayer came to His holy dwelling place to heaven. God not only saw it, He heard it. That's the God that we serve. He heard their rejoicing. He saw their hearts, and His heart was full as well. He was very happy with their decisions and the way that they had realigned themselves back to Him. King Hezekiah took control of the nation's missteps and turned them back to God, and he realigned that nation with his instructions that they were to follow. And because of this, the rejoicing was incredible.

Sometimes I wonder how Israel failed to continue keeping the Passover from Solomon's time up to King Hezekiah. Like, what happened? How did they end up off track? What did they do that completely blundered the whole process? And then they're like, what holy days? Children growing up not even knowing that God had given holy days. How did they lose sight of all of this? For us, it may seem silly for us to consider that there could ever be a time that we don't keep the Passover. Right? This is something so important, so vital to us. And for me to say, well, be careful because a time could come where you may not keep the Passover. You guys would think I was crazy. I lost my rocker. You might be running me off the stage. But could that happen?

We have to be real with ourselves because Israel wasn't that much different from the rest of us.

To say that I'll never not keep a Passover, we have to recognize that at times we can be so tricked or so confused or so misled or weights of things could come in or we could just stumble greatly ourselves to where something of this level of importance, even something such as the Passover, could fail to be observed. If we lose sight of the power of alignment, something like this has a real chance of happening. We have just spent the last seven days putting leaven out of our lives and putting the unleavened bread of Jesus Christ more into our lives. It's been, again, a time of self-reflection and I hope a time of joy and a time of growth. The season is not just about identifying the major issues or the big sins that exist in our lives. It's also to note the adjustments or the alignments that need to be made because being just a little bit out of alignment, like with a spacecraft on their way to the moon, can make all of the difference. Even a small misalignment can have a huge effect.

With our own physical bodies and things that we own in our lives, there's a lot of comparisons we could make. I know that as one who has back troubles from time to time, as one is, you know, supporting Laura through her back problems last year and a half and then having to have a surgery.

I should have asked her, but I don't know if they ever told us how much her back vertebrae were out of alignment. Do you recall? It was minuscule. It was really, really small. The tolerances of that one vertebrae being kind of slipped forward and pressing on the nerves and the amount of pain it created for how out of alignment it was, you wouldn't think it would be that bad. You would think it would have to, for that amount of pain, it would have to be way out. But when we look at how tight certain tolerances are in the vertebrae in our back and the nervous system with how it works, it doesn't take much. And you know that yourself. There's been so many times I've had such a strong pain that I'm like, it literally has to be like sticking out. My back does right now.

And I go and put my hand on it and you can't, I can't tell at all where it's at out at or what it's doing. The tolerances is so small. Or if you've ever driven a car out of alignment, anybody done that? You look at the wheels, they look fine. Because I've traveled behind some people where the wheels are like this and it's obvious the car is not in alignment. Or it's actually going down the road a little crooked. But if you've ever driven a car like that's just a slight little bit out of alignment, you look at the wheels, you can't tell. It doesn't look any different than it did the day before. But you can notice it where? In the steering wheel, right? That's usually where I can notice it because now I'm having to tip the steering wheel a little bit to one side just to make the car go straight. And it's not just that you tip it, now you're fighting with it. Because the car wants to go back to straight and then wants to go off the road. And so you're constantly driving this car just a little bit crooked in order to keep it going straight down the road.

It's exhausting on a long trip. Like if you're on your way to the feast or you're on your way to Florida and your car is out of alignment, that's not a fun trip to take. Because the whole way you're fighting with your car just to keep it going straight. And then if you've ever paid for tires, you realize you're spending money on wearing out these tires much more quickly.

My brother Troy, when I graduated college, Troy was a few years behind me. I'll tell a story on him. And I got a new car. I'd never had a new car. I got a new car. It was a stick shift. It had a six-cylinder engine. It wasn't a sports car, but it could get up and go. Troy would never fail, any time he would drive the car, to tweak the tires every single time he took off. To the point that if I was inside with other people, I could say, give it 20 seconds, wait for it. And then you would hear it. Troy would just like, he would pop the clutch, tire spin, and I'm counting how much money is going out the window. Troy didn't care. He'd never bought a pair of tires before.

The first time he got his own car and he had to replace his tires, I said, are you going to continue to drive my car the way that you have in the past? And he goes, well, not if I have to pay for the tires, I'm not. Right? When we replace our own tires, and we spend now up towards, if you're going to buy a good set of tires, $1,000 is not a lot for these SUVs and things now to put into a car. And then you're driving at 1,000 miles down the road out of alignment. You know how the mileage is just ticking away on those trips? So are my dollar signs. It's like I'm throwing them out the window. But if you look at that car, you can't tell the tire is out of alignment, but you can feel it, right? God gives us a huge gift with His Holy Spirit working in our lives. It's like you're in my hands on the steering wheel. We can feel that there's a struggle, that I'm wasting energy trying to drive this car crooked just to make it go straight down the road. How many times that I've had to look myself in the mirror and say, Mike, you're trying to drive your life straight down the road, but you're doing it with a hand tied behind your back. You're doing it with the steering wheel crooked. You're exhausting yourself. This isn't fun. What Israel was doing with King Hezekiah, this was fun. This was rejoicing like they had never experienced in their life.

Not just one week, let's do it two weeks. But when I'm struggling with my own steering wheel, it's exhausting and I want this trip to stop. It shows again this power of alignment that God gives us at this time of the year. He shows us the areas where the car doesn't, to other people, they may not even see it, but He shows us through His Spirit. He gives us that calibration tool that's, and the passages in His Scripture to say, Mike, you're not in alignment in this area, and you're struggling, and you're wearing yourself out. And so we can praise Him that we have come through another season, and we can do this alignment check all through the year, right?

You don't only maybe take your car in or get your back checked one time a year, you do it on a regular basis, and we should, but He has carved out a specific point of this year, as He does every year, for us to do an alignment check. But now that we've done this alignment check, how silly would it be if we just went back and got out of a line again, right? If you took your car in, and you got it aligned, and it's working now great, and then as soon as you get back and you're driving down the road, and then what do you do? You start looking for every pothole you can hit along the way, right? No, that would be insane, and if anybody was in the car, you'd be like, what are you doing? You just got your car fixed! Or if you went to the chiropractor, and you got your backpack in alignment because you had something out, and then you get home from that appointment, and then what do you do? You go pick up the snow shovel when you start clearing the driveway. You said, who needs help moving today? I want to go help somebody move. My back feels great.

No, that would be insane, right? Everybody would be like, what are you doing?

But is this what we do sometimes with our own lives? God gives us this week to pause. He gives us this week to consider more purposefully our lives, and then if we're not wise, could we just start looking for every pothole to hit again? Could we look for snow that needs shoveled and just wreck ourselves all over again? You and I would be concerned for one another if that was our motivations or our thoughts, but if we're not careful coming out of these days, we could fall back in to some of our previous missteps.

I still don't know how Israel lost sight of the Holy Days, but I think it had to be something of the similar magnitude that I've just walked us through.

Could we take back the burden of our sins coming out of these days and go back to our old way of thinking or behaving? We could. We can. But what are we going to do coming out of these days?

I'd like to illustrate three points as we kind of work towards the second half of this message or the last third of this message. Three aspects. There's a lot more that we could dive into when we talk about alignment and God and the time of the year we're in, but I want to look at three areas. The first being, misalignment begins with distrust. Misalignment begins with distrust.

All we have to do is to look back at the beginning of our Bibles to see how distrust in God knocked Adam and Eve out of alignment with their Creator. They fell for the lie that God knows that in the day you eat the forbidden fruit, your eyes will be open and you will be like God.

They did not trust God enough to stay true to His teaching. Mankind, time and time again, has decided to trust their own judgment over God's commands. We have doubted God's goodness and His sovereignty over our lives and did not trust Him with our whole heart. We sometimes feel that God's instructions need to be bent because we see no other way to do something that needs to be done than to bend God's rules just a bit and then to justify why that's okay.

I think Abraham's example fits this challenge. Early in Genesis chapter 12, God promises Abraham, I will make you a great nation. This is, if you want to write in your notes, Genesis 12 verse 2, I will make you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and I will curse Him who curses you and all the families of the earth shall be blessed. You would think at this, Abraham would say, God, I'll do whatever you want me to do. But when God's plan makes a slight change and due to famine they end up in Egypt, Abraham tells Sarah, his wife, I need you to act like you're not married to me. You need to just be my sister on this trip because if they see how beautiful you are, which you are, they'll probably kill me so that then they can marry you. But if you're my sister, then they won't kill me.

That's pretty much exactly how it went down. The Egyptians there saw that how beautiful Sarah was and they decided to take her into Pharaoh's house and then God intervened and said, not today.

And everything came to light and it was made aware to Pharaoh of what happened.

And God protected Sarah, Abraham, and kept Pharaoh from sinning as well. So you would think, okay, Abraham's got to learn his lesson from this one, but you guys know where I'm going to because just a few chapters later, chapter 20, a similar situation happens again. And Abraham does pretty much the same thing and almost pays the consequences again. So it's not hard to see things going on in our lives and realize, oh, I need to bend this a little bit to make it fit what I need to do in my life. And it doesn't take a lot of twisting or turning to get ourselves out of alignment with God as we even see. Because when you look through all the great things that Abraham did, the list is long. His faith that he had was strong. His willingness to do what God asked him to do was great. But then a couple of places where there's a misalignment that could go very, very bad very, very quickly could have cost him his life and even could have even cost an error in his family if God didn't intervene. So we see that misalignment begins with distrust.

There's another aspect. Second one, partial obedience is disobedience.

Partial obedience is disobedience. When we consider the common example in life, we would not consider partial calibration of our tools or measuring devices acceptable, would we?

I don't think Mr. Kaczmalski's clients, if he got it pretty close to intolerance, would be like, well, he it's good enough, right? It worked. I think they'd be looking for another vendor. They would be pretty upset. They would want their money back.

With our mower blade, if you go through the effort of flipping your mower over, taking the blade off, sharpening it, would you just sharpen one end of the blade and say, good enough, I got one side of it done, and you just slap it back on? If anybody ever saw someone do that, I think we'd think they were pretty crazy. Why go through all that effort to take it off, sharpen one side, and not take a few more seconds to do the other? We wouldn't put new tires on our car and spend that money, and then tell them just do a one-wheel alignment. The left-back one, start there.

We wouldn't go through that effort, right? We would say do a four-wheel alignment, not just one.

And if NASA knew that their spacecraft was off majorly, they wouldn't just adjust the velocity if it also needed an attitude or an altitude adjustment. They wouldn't say, well, it's close enough. It'll get there on time. It's just not going to be in the right location. They wouldn't make just that part of an adjustment. I had a friend. He's Canadian, so I don't know if that helps the story or not, or if you're Canadian. I'm going to run to my car after the sermon.

He was over at our house when I was back in college just for a visit, and my brother, who's a, he's a civil engineer, and so my brother Dwayne thinks differently than I do, and very bright. And my parents wanted a deck built onto the back of the house, and Dwayne spent all day with, I don't even know what it's called, the tripod with the spot where you could start measuring things and make sure everything's in alignment. Anybody know what that's called?

Dwayne's very crazy. See, you guys are smart. So he has that out, and he's got rope lines, and he's got the holes dug for where the, and he's putting in six by six posts. So not the four by four, but six by six posts, and a whole bunch of them, and we spent pretty much a whole day just getting these posts where they're supposed to be before we even started building the deck.

And my friend from Canada, he's like, what? This is ridiculous how much time you guys spent on this.

He goes up in Canada, when we're doing a building project, we're pretty much like, good enough! And I laughed, but I've never forgotten that, because there's probably a little bit of truth to what he was saying, not just Canadians, right? But there's people who do that in their life. If you're out on some social media feeds and the home improvement projects that some people have to do, or the way that they do it, I saw one where somebody built a block foundation for a house, and somebody who came along after them, who's supposed to continue to build, took a photo of it, put it online, and that block wall is going like this, down one wall. And this is the foundation because they backfilled along the foundation before they reinforced and it wasn't done right. That's somebody's home, right? There were some jokes on there that they should go and buy lumber, the footer, or the boards that start going on top of that. They should go down to Home Depot and Lowe's and buy the boards there because they could probably match the curve.

Any of you who've bought lumber and you know that, how many times you pick up a piece of lumber and you look at it, I put it on the ground and then I'm like, that one's warped. Grab another one, that one's warped, and by the time I've spent 20 minutes there trying to find a straight board.

But this is somebody's house that somebody walked away from saying, good enough.

These are the dangers that we run into with our own lives. You wouldn't go and get your car aligned and say, just do the back left tire. You wouldn't just sharpen one half of the blade for your mower.

You wouldn't go to the chiropractor and then start lifting heavy objects just because you can again.

We would look at each other and say, what's wrong? Are you okay? But could we come out of these days that we've just observed, this time that we've spent, the rejoicing that God has brought into our hearts because He's forgiven us again of our sins and reconciled us as He does every time we repent. But we remembered the cost that was paid for our lives. Could we fall back and go back to disobedience?

Disobedience.

Why would we believe that partial obedience is good enough? We can each go down a list of things that we don't do to prove to ourselves that we're not that bad of a Christian, but do we still leave other things undone? Are there areas that we harbor or we protect because it's too difficult or we think that it's not that bad of a sin? Can we fall into the same thought pattern that the Pharisees did when Jesus called them hypocrites? Outwardly, they looked apart because they fasted. They kept the Sabbath. They didn't touch things that were unclean, but Christ refers to them inwardly that they're dead. We must not stop at partial obedience because partial obedience is still disobedience.

The third aspect that we'll look at, the last one, is proximity to God does not equal alignment with God. Proximity to God does not equal alignment with God. We can drive by a chiropractor's office or by a tire shop daily, but is that going to fix our back problems if we just drive by it?

We see it with our eyes. It's right outside the car window, but we never pull in to stop.

Or even if we walk in the front door of the chiropractor's office and we sit down in the their lobby in a chair, is that enough? If we never go up to the desk, let them know we're here, or never go back to the room and actually have an adjustment made. It won't fix the issues just because we're close to the source of the fix. Proximity isn't enough. We must take the next step to have our problems fixed. There were many people who spent close time with Jesus during his time on the earth. They walked with him. They talked with him, but in the end, many didn't follow him. Some of the Pharisees even believed. They secretly had meetings or conversations with Christ because they realized he's not wrong. He's right. There's something different in his messaging. The miracles he's performed can only be done by the Messiah. But how many let their lives be changed by their Savior? The disciples at different times did things that didn't seem like they were on board with Jesus's teachings. James and John, what did they want to do? Put me at your left hand and my brother at your right hand. Remember that account? Because they wanted to sit on Jesus's right and left hand side and rule with him in the kingdom. Peter, he denied Jesus three times on the most difficult day of Jesus's physical life. After his resurrection, Thomas said, unless I see in his hands the print of the nails and put my fingers in the print of the nails and put my hand into his side, I won't believe. Jesus had many disciples at one point in his ministry, but most of them stopped following him because of a hard saying that we read in John chapter 6. We're not going to read through if you can turn there. I'd encourage you to turn there because we're going to focus on the end of the story. I'm not going to read through the bulk of this account, but this is that account which we often read at Passover where Jesus is sharing the example how to live in him, to follow after him. We must eat of his flesh and drink of his blood, and that's where we would have eternal life and the disciples, they weren't all understanding this. We come to the end of the account in John 6 and verse 61.

It says, when Jesus knew in himself that his disciples complained about this, and he's not talking just about the 12, he's talking about a lot more. He had a lot more than 12 disciples at this point, and he complained about this, and he said, does this offend you? What then, if you should see the Son of Man ascend where he was before? It is the Spirit which gives life. The flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life. He's saying, this is the only place you're going to find real life, is in what I'm saying through here, and you're confused, and you don't want to believe. And he says, but there are some of you who do not believe, for Jesus knew from the beginning who they were, who they were who did not believe and who would betray him. And he said, therefore I have said to you that no one can come to me unless it has been granted to him by the Father. And then from that time, many of his disciples went back and walked with him no more. That went back is an important part of this story, because what did they give up at earlier on to become a disciple of Jesus Christ? They would have given up their careers.

They would have left their families. They would have went away from going to the synagogues, the way that they did before, to follow after Christ. If he was on a journey, they would have journeyed with him. They would have been there every single time he paused to speak to the multitude.

They would have been part of the crowd. They gave up a lot to follow after Christ, but it says they went back. They went back to their homes. They went back to their towns. They went back to their careers. They went back to their families. Could we go back after these days?

We see time and time again, throughout Scripture, people going back. And Jesus, in his own presence, had some of his own disciples go back.

Then Jesus said to the 12 in verse 67, do you also want to go away? So now he's addressing the 12 that would be there at the end of his before his crucifixion. And Jesus said to the 12 in verse 67, I can't imagine the weightiness of those words to say to his own disciples.

Because he was rejected by his own. Those who spent that time with him, and they said, we're going back. We want nothing to do with you anymore. Do you also want to go away to the 12?

But what we see Peter share next, I hope, is the attitude that we will carry ourselves forward with from these days. This is why we're sitting here right now and why others were with us this morning. Why on a Wednesday in the middle of the week, we're not at school, we're not at work.

It's exactly what Peter is about to say, because he answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go?

You have the words of eternal life. Also, we have come to believe and know that you are the Christ, the Son, and the living God. This is why we can't go back, right? This is why there's no other option.

This is why there's no other option. And when I said, could you ever imagine not keeping Passover?

You're like, have you read John 6? There is no going back. This is it. This is crazy that you would even talk that way. But we wouldn't... others have gone back. Many times over thousands of years, others have gone back. And I don't share this as a warning, per se, because I'm concerned that you'll go back. More that I want you to walk forward in the light that you've been given this week. Those things that you've considered, those sins that you've repented of, those things that you said, I don't want this anymore. Live with that in your heart. Go forward from here with that rejoice scene, as Israel did when they got back to keeping the Passover and the Days of Unleavened bread. When all the other disciples walked away from Jesus, but the Twelve said, I'm summarizing, where else we're gonna go? They can leave, but I know where I'm gonna stay. This has to be the way that we go forward this week. This has to be the motivation that's in our hearts, and I know that it is. But we can't ever lose sight of the power of alignment, because it doesn't take being out of the line very much, whether it's your back, your car, a spacecraft going through space, to completely miss the target. It just doesn't take much. That's why God calls us every single year to repeat these days, to go through the practice. Some say that they're too elementary, they're too basic.

Oh, the same thing. What message are we gonna hear this year that we haven't heard before?

God, in His wisdom, knows that this is what we have to do. Because it's too important if we don't.

There's so many more lessons we could draw about being aligned with God, and there's just not enough time for today. We know as we exit these days that this is not the only time of the year, again, that we can realign ourselves with God. I appreciate so much of the messaging that was shared from the focus on the sacrifices, the life of Jesus Christ, the pricelessness of what someone would pay for to have their sins forgiven and to count the costs.

Appreciate the messaging this morning about the fruits developing in your life that God wants to see and the importance of that, and not looking back. I'll not forget that story about the motorcycle now. We can't look back, right? You can't drive your car by staring in the rearview mirror of life. God wants us to move forward, and I'm preaching to the choir, I know that. We've said this a hundred thousand times. God wants us to go forward, but we have to be in alignment with Him as we do this. It's this time of the year that we focus in a bit tighter on what it means to follow after Christ. I love Matthew 16, and we'll use this as our last passage, Matthew 16 verse 24 and verse 25.

But I'm warning you, if you try to put this to heart, you're going to spend the rest of your life trying to live this one out.

Matthew 16 verse 24, and then Jesus said to His disciples, If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me.

For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.

There's a cost for being spiritually out of alignment with God. There's separation from God.

There's loss of purpose or calling. We do harm to others. We miss out on the blessings God wants us to have.

And spiritual deception or hardness of hearts can come into our lives, and we can be misled like the other disciples when it was a hard saying. Who can understand it?

But this does not have to be how our story ends.

And we see time and time again of God's redemption story being played out because of His love, His mercy, His long-suffering, and His willingness to continue to work even with our flaws.

And so may we go forward from these days, like the Israelites of old, rejoicing, celebrating.

And if you want to keep eating your own leavened bread and keep picturing that you're taking in Christ, do it.

I'm going to be doing it because we still got a lot of fun food to eat this week.

But isn't that the point? Isn't that the point of why we're here, why we've done what we've done, and why we're going to continue to do it? Because we can't quit. Where else are we going to go?

There is power in alignment, especially as we align our lives with God.

May you have a blessed rest of this holy day as these days come to a close, and may we have a very blessed year as our rejoicing continues until we're right back here a year from now enjoying another one of these blessed times that God has given us.