Joel - When the Mountains Drip with Wine

Automated transcript, lightly edited for readability. Scripture appears as spoken; the video is the authoritative teaching.

I will let the kids be dismissed here. And there we go. Wish you about shalom everybody. Welcome back. So we are we're nearing the end of the series that was only supposed to be about five prophets. Thank you for being my companion through the series for the past year as we tackled pretty much all the prophets. And so we're we're nearing the end of our Homeward Bound series and I know we took a detour for Shavuot and Ruth. And the last few prophets we kind of camped out in were pretty rich, pretty tough. We know Habakkuk stood in his watchtower and asked God how long he had to scream before anything was actually going to change in this world.

Zephaniah looked everybody in the eye and just started talking about what was coming in the day of the Lord. And then we have Obadiah, probably the shortest book in the Old Testament or one of them. He takes on Edom, the brother nation of Judah, Israel, that stood on the ridge and watched Jerusalem burn and just did nothing. And the prophet said it will be measured back to you exactly the same way you have dished it out. And so today we're going to jump into another prophet, Joel. Now just like some of the other prophetic works that we've worked through in the Bible, we have no clue who this guy is.

We don't have a lot of information about Joel. We don't even know what time period he really lived in. We believe it was well, we don't know if it was pre-exilic or post-exilic, which is a big deal. We have a guess of about anywhere between a 400-year span. So it's humbling when we run across books like that. But, we can kind of conclude a few theories about who he was based on what he talked about the most. So, he talked about Jerusalem a lot. He talked about the temple a lot. And he referenced sacrifices a lot, which may mean that he may have been a priest or someone who was associated with the temple, which kind of puts a bit more zeal into the message and an insight here, if you will.

And the most memorable part of the Book of Joel that I think many of us as believers are most familiar with is the spirit being poured out. The verse in there where it talks about his spirit being poured out in this generation. And it's the same verse that Peter quoted in Acts chapter 2. And that's kind of what the whole Book of Joel is building up to. It's it takes kind of the curse of Genesis 3, and it re- winds it. It turns it backwards on itself until we come to this point where we're undoing and going backwards through all of the curses that have the land and all of the things that took place when Adam and Eve, the fall, happened.

And before that, we have God's spirit fully embraced by all living creatures in the world, fully available, so on and so forth. And so, that's kind of the concept as we move backwards to Genesis 3 as we move forward through Joel. And so, where Joel starts in Joel chapter 1, it starts in a field that has just been decimated by locusts, these mega cricket creatures. I'm sure we've seen them on television and stuff that eat everything in their path. And when I was looking into it, wanted to kind of get some historical background, you know, when has this happened before? Is there anything I can pull from?

The Locust Plague of 1915

And yeah, I found a copy of happened to find a copy of National Geographic from December 1915 that spoke about a locust swarm that hit Jerusalem in Israel. And it was in the spring of 1915 that this took place. A plague of locust came down on the land of Israel from March to October that year and the swarms came one after another after another and just stripped Jerusalem of almost all of its vegetation. And there was a man there, this American man by the name of John Whiting who lived in Jerusalem and he spoke Arabic and he knew the land. He was very familiar. And he wrote about the whole event.

He had photos and everything and that's what he submitted to National Geographic later that year. If you would like to look at that issue, the link to the PDF file is in the YouTube description at the bottom of the description. So it's pretty neat to see all the ads and everything that they were showing during that time. But when Whiting was describing the event real time he kept reaching for the Bible multiple times. Just I believe 10 or 15 times I believe. Just referencing these little quick scriptures cuz that's all he could pull from to describe what he was seeing and he pulled from the book of Joel specifically over and over and over again.

A man standing in a real plague. He wrote about going up and when the locust started coming in, he was helping people. They were using these big flags to not just swat them away but kind of swat them down into this trap they had made. So they were trying to get the locust into this trap as they were eating everything. Just these fierce warriors in the midst of this overwhelming army. There's no way, right? But as they were doing that and getting all these locust and trying to kill as many as they could, there was an older farmer that walked up to him and said, I mean, you should just go home. Like there's no use.

You're not going to You're not going to be able to do this. And later in the article, Whiting he admitted the old man was right. The sky filled with darkness and the land was eaten down to wood and bark. And oh, I think I pulled some images. So, we have before and after pictures of what that would have looked like in Jerusalem when this plague of locust came wave after wave. So, when I first saw this, I thought it was a vegetation before the locust started eating it. No, this those are that's locust covering the monument. You can imagine now Ew, why you can't I mean, how do you navigate life during this?

There they are. This is the farmers and the locals using the flags and on the bottom there they have this contraption containment contraption where the locust are somehow lured in and they get trapped in these boxes or contraptions that they have. They're trying their best to get flags to woo them in woo them in. Effort, it's good. A for effort, right? And so, I think that was it. So, just to give you an idea the thing that Joel is describing at the opening verses of Joel is not a metaphor. It's a real horrifying and terrifying event that real farmers and entire communities still experience today and they lose everything.

You know, the sky turns dark and the sound of rushing wings come and this orchestra leading the symphony of terror comes upon the land. And the field that took you and your community a year to grow is gone in an afternoon. And that's that's where we open right here in Joel chapter 1 verse 4. It says, "What the cutting locust left, the swarming locust have eaten. What the swarming locust left, the hopping locust has eaten. And what the hopping locust left, the destroying locust have eaten. And so, what's neat, if you want to be nerdy, you can go back. He uses four different words for locust in that, and he uses them sequentially like that.

He had one after another, but he changes the word up. And we're not really sure why he does that. We're not sure if he's talking about four different species of locust coming in, or four different stages of the same insect, but he's making the points clear. Whatever the first wave of locust didn't finish, the next wave was going to take a crack at it. And then whatever they didn't finish, the next wave, and the next wave, and the next wave, there's not going to be any hope left. Everything will be gone. And he looks up and the grain is stripped, and the vine is stripped, and the fig tree is stripped.

The Ground That Turned Against Us

And the priests now have nothing left to offer at the temple because there's no grain left. Even worship at the temple has stopped because of the bugs. These locusts. The whole economy of Israel is collapsed in one season. Now, let's mark Joel. And I want to make sure it's set up right for where we're going in Joel. Let's go back to the first time the Bible talks about the ground looking like this. When the ground was cursed, and that's in Genesis chapter 3, right? Right after the fall of the Adam and Eve story. Part of the curse that was unleashed because of their yearning to determine good and evil for themselves apart from God was that the ground would stop producing, right?

And Genesis chapter 3, 17 through 18, it says, "Cursed is the ground because of you. In pain you shall eat of it all of the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you or for you." And so, we have the story of the Bible starting in a but also in a world that is called good. Ground that produces without resistance. You'd walk up to a tree, pick the fruit, and the ground is on your side. It's trying to help you. It wants to be a part of you thriving. Pushes everything forward. And of course, three chapters in, doesn't take us humans very long, the ground turns on us. The earth itself becomes a witness against humanity.

So whatever broke in chapter three with Adam and Eve, that betrayal and disobedience broke creation as well, so the soil as well. And we kind of see that theme, it's neat theme to track with that motif throughout scripture, with when Cain murders Abel. Abel's blood cries out to God from the ground. It's a witness. The ground itself has become a witness against humanity. The wilderness is 40 years of the ground not producing food. That's why the bread had to fall from out of the sky, from heaven. And the promised land, the promised land is described as the opposite. The land flowing with milk and honey.

So, you see the point. A land where the ground works again for humanity. And the whole story of Israel is the story of a people trying to get back into the land and the ground that produces blessings instead of curse. And of course, the we've seen throughout the prophets, every prophet is kind of inching towards that day when that curse is going to be broken and creation is made whole again along with unity between man and God. And so, we have Joel chapter one and we come up on verse 10 and it says, "The fields are destroyed, the ground mourns because the grain is destroyed, the wine dries up, the oil languishes, the vine continues to dry up.

The fig tree languishes, the pomegranate, the palm, and apple, all of the trees of the field are dried up. And gladness dries up from the children of man. So, look at what he's doing with the verses we just went through. Joel chapter 1 10 through 12. He's not just describing a disaster here. He's describing the events of Genesis 3 real time. The ground is now mourning. The vine is drying up. The trees dried up. And then there's that banger line at the end of there. The gladness dries up from the children of man. The cursed ground does not just kill plants. It kills joy. The ground and the people are in the same condition now.

The ground refuses to produce and the people lose the capacity to feel anything but loss and grief. The locusts are Genesis 3 cycling through one more generation. Except this time the prophet is in the field watching all of it unfold. Now, chapter 1 of Joel and again, there's only a few chapters in Joel and as every message, I try to encourage you, go home and read this book. It's not very long. You can knock it out really fast. Just like many of the minor prophets. And my hope is that I'm able to get you excited about what the Bible is so you will be excited to dive into it and to meditate on it and to draw out even more of what the scriptures are trying to say.

But, Joel chapter 1 walks us through this devastation that we reviewed and have pictures of something similar in National Geographic's. Just total devastation. But, Joel 2 opens up with an alarm. It's the shofar sounding in Zion. The day of the Lord is coming. The sun and the moon and the stars are darkening and the earth is quaking. Everything that could go wrong is going wrong, right? It's just escalating to a point of overwhelming wrath from God. What are we going to do? The joy's gone, the land's gone, there's no hope. And this would be the perfect time for a perfect time for an angry Elijah to continue putting the smack down on Israel, right?

Yet Even Now

It's just appropriate. Let's escalate it some more. You guys deserve this all this. But then there's a verse that's unexpected that comes about and it a pivot occurs in verse chapter sorry. Joel chapter 2 verse 12 and it states this. It says, "Yet even now declares the Lord, return to me with all of your heart, with fasting and with weeping and with mourning and rend your hearts and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, yet even now." So, what's going on here? What are all the prophets pretty much dealing with when they're accusing Judah and or Israel?

What's the biggest problem that they're running into? Or specifically in Judah, people were walking through the motions of what it looked like to be the people of God. They had the temple. They knew how to run the temple. They knew how to do the whole the whole thing the whole game. It looked real good. They had the altar going. They have all these rules. It's great protocol, holiness. They had it down. Shabbat every single week. Shabbat shalom. High five. And yet it's the same thing Yeshua accuses the Pharisees of and the religious elite in Matthew 23. You're just dead man's bones on the inside.

You're really shiny on the outside. You've You've a really good job. But you're not you're denying yourself from actually becoming what you say you want to be. You continue to stay and retract yourself from the love of God. You continue to stay and retract yourself from the grace of God. You continue to say, "You know what? Justice is good as long as it tilts toward something that's advantageous for me." Yes, we need to feed the poor unless it's too expensive. That's what all the prophets are calling out and that's what's he's calling out right now is saying the people have for so long been doing these motions.

And this is the reason why God's wrath is coming up. It's the same thing Adam and Eve pulled. Yes, yes, we want to serve the Lord. We want to stay in the garden. We want to do all these things, but we want to do it our way. We want to be the ones that are fully in charge of determining what good and evil is the way that we want to produce it. Which is great, right? Liberty, freedom until everybody starts determining good and evil for themselves. And then what happens? We begin looking at each other and determining who is good and evil for ourselves. And what does that yield? That yields violence.

And that's exactly what takes place in the first few chapters of the Bible. That's That's why No, that's why the flood was sent. The earth had become too violent. People were so accustomed to just killing people, labeling someone bad or evil, and yep, they're the way they got to go. Let's just kill them. Is it There's a man There's a man that wrote poetry about it in the first few chapters of the Bible. And how easy that is to relate to if we're honest. How easy is it to go out in the world and look at someone and already have a label that you can sort them into whatever bin they need to go in to make you feel safe or feel a certain way because you've already determined what their past is, what their present is, where they're going in their life.

Exactly what April was speaking about during the Torah portion. And what's sad is many times we have no idea we do it. This is the This is the type of people that God is speaking about. And when wrath comes, the people are rending their clothes, they're mourning and grieving and ah! The prophet's saying God's saying, "Why don't you try rending the thing that actually matters? The thing that is keeping you away from the fullness of love and grace and the world to come. Keeping us away from the garden. Rend your heart." And the message from God to these people is "After everything you have done and betrayed, how you have totally misrepresented everything that I wanted you to be, how you've mis- misrepresented me and my message in the most horrible ways, yet even now."

Two Hebrew words. "Even at this exact moment, after everything we've just walked through, even in this wreckage, even when you have every reason to assume the door is locked, even now, you have not gone too far for my love, for my grace and mercy. Return to me. Return." That's the pivot in Joel. Joel does not put "Even now" in front of his sermon though. I mean, his sermon starts where? With the locusts. It comes after the locusts. He says, He waits till this moment in the sermon where it's most justified for the people who have experienced such hard hardship and the repercussions of their actions to believe that they're too far gone.

And it's a to say you're not too far gone. Just because you've gone a long ways doesn't mean you're too far gone. This is when the devastation turns into the reversal. Which is God's love language, I believe, I've come to believe. God's love language is irony and dramatic reversals, both in the Bible and real life. And Lord knows. Verse 18 in Joel chapter 2. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. Then the Lord became jealous for his land and had pity on his people. The Lord answered and said to his people, "Behold, I am sending you grain and wine and oil, and you will be satisfied."

Restoring the Years

The grain and the wine and the oil were the things the locusts just ate. God is going to put back exactly what was taken. The prophet's doing the inventory in reverse here. And then a few verses later in verse 25, he says, "I will restore to you the years that the swarming locusts have eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army, which I have sent among you." Now, I didn't highlight it, we have years, but restore is what I wanted to highlight. So, restore here comes from the same Hebrew root as shalom. And shalom is shalom an unhappy word or a happy word? It's a happy word.

It means peace, and not just like peace is in like but like fulfillment and contentment, where there's no more fear. Like absolute security peace. Arms of your mother or father around you peace. And it's not just talking about an a refund of what was taken away. It's talking about making something whole again. It's a step above. It's He's not refunding what you just lost. God is going to like shalomify it, if you will. He's He's making it whole plus some. The interest is going to be returned. And then we get to years. And that duration matters. I will restore to you the years that the swarm or swarming locust have eaten. Not weeks, it's plural.

Not weeks or days. Joel's naming a very specific type of compounding loss. It's a slow loss. It's a grinding loss. It's It's an entire decade that was impacted. The wilderness season. Like a relationship or a marriage that 10 or 20 years down the road has grinded down so slowly that you didn't even catch it. Very slow grade. Where the faith went numb. God says I'm going to restore the years. All of it. Because when a plague comes, specifically in the ancient world, it didn't just impact this year's harvest. It destroyed next year's seed as well, right? The animals that you were going to use to plow the fields for next years, now they don't have any food.

So we have a much larger scale problem. The workers? Well, the workers don't have any food either, so they're either going to stay and starve in that community or they're going to leave and walk away. One locust year impacted and stole years of future for the generation. And it would commonly dissolve entire communities. So when God says I will restore to you the years that the locust ate. He's not promising a one-time refund. He's promising to undo the compound interest of grief and loss that has occurred. And then we come to verse 28 29 in chapter 2, and it says, "It shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh."

Poured Out on All Flesh

There's our favorite verse, the memorable one. We all kind of recognize that because we see that in New Testament. It shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my spirit in all flesh. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. Your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female servants in those days I will pour out my spirit. Pour out. So, the word there is shafak. And that word means it's used by the prophets. It's used by the prophets when God pours out his wrath, right? When you hear this word from a prophet, you kind of brace for the judgment that's coming cuz obviously God's going to pour it out.

You deserved it or people deserved it, and the wrath is being poured out. But Joel takes that same verb and he orients it just a little bit differently. He takes the same word that the prophets typically use for wrath, and now he uses it for God's spirit. And look who gets the spirit. We get sons and daughters. We get fit men, 30-year-old fit men at the peak of their lives, old men. Oh. Then we get the young men, the ones that are still maturing, still growing, don't have status yet. And who else gets the spirit that God is about to pour out? The male and female leaders of the community? No, the slaves, the servants.

The servants. Joel is listing every single category in the biblical world that had limited access to God in some way, shape, or form. By gender, or by age, or by status. And Joel is saying that the spirit gets poured out on all of them. Do you know who else noticed that verse? Of course, it's it's a familiar verse because Peter spoke it in Acts chapter 2. The spirit falls on 120 disciples in Jerusalem, and people speak in languages that they never learned before, and the crowd thinks that they're drunk. And Peter stands up, and the first thing that comes out of his mouth is, "Guys, what are you talking about?

This is what was uttered through the prophet Joel. You're seeing it occur." Right? He's identifying this is what Joel was talking about. He's saying that what you're watching right now is the verse that you just heard. The fisherman is saying the prophet was looking at that generation and anticipating this moment. And you're so focused on your own labels of people and determining what the past of someone is, what the present of someone is, what the future of someone is, that the only thing that you can conclude, they have to be drunk. Cuz I There's no way God There's no way. There's no way that this is any type of fulfillment other than that.

The Mountains Will Drip with Sweet Wine

When you get to Joel chapter 3, the concluding chapter we have my favorite verse in the book and it's the prophet's vision of the day that curse begins to run backwards, hit rewind on it. And it's in chapter 3 verse 18 and it says, "In that day the mountains shall drip with sweet wine and the hills shall flow with milk and the stream beds of Judah shall flow with water and a fountain shall come forth from the house of the Lord and water from the valley of Shittim." The mountains will drip with sweet wine. It's a It's the So, Hebrew word for wine is Anybody? Yayin, right? It's the one word everyone knows for some reason.

Yeah, yayin. Yayin, this is asis, I think. That's how you pronounce it. It's it's the freshest of wine. You could almost say it's it's right when the grapes are crushed. Like the sweetest and most pure essence of everything that's in the grape. Not yet fermented, pure, sweet. The very first thing that comes out of the press. The mountains will drip asis, the sweetest, freshest wine. That's an impossible image. Like we love to think, "Oh yeah, the wine's going to flow." But like that's like mountains don't produce wine, they produce rocks. It's all the mountain is, big rock. Hills do not flow with milk.

Hills produce goats and dust. The whole image is the prophet seeing a world where the ground itself has stopped fighting against us. The ground itself has joined in celebration of being reunited with everything that God is and God wants with humanity. So much though that it's an open bar of fresh grape juice. It's Genesis 3 running backwards. Just like Jeremiah talks about it undoing the inversion of it. The cursed ground no longer produces thorns. It's producing wine. And I find that very fun to think about and impactful. The language. And so, where it gets kind of cinematic is the fountain comes from the house of the Lord on the mountain.

He goes on to speak about that. She kind of house of the Lord. And that's a familiar image because that's the same thing that Ezekiel speaks about at the end of Ezekiel. Ezekiel 47. Ezekiel speaks about a river that flows out from under the temple healing the salt water of the Dead Sea. And everything it touches just sprouts. We have Zechariah as well. Zechariah 14, the living water is going out of Jerusalem. John in Revelation 22, the river of life flowing out of the throne of God. Old Testament uses this imagery a lot. A river that comes from God's presence and heals the cursed ground as it flows.

It always comes from God outward and the cursed ground gets healed by contact. Now, the fountain from the house of the Lord is going where though? In the very end of the verse. It shall come forth from the house of the Lord and the water and it will water and submerge and impact the valley of Shittim. And Shittim is one of the biblical words. It's a location that you don't really dive into because it's probably just a random city. It's mentioned. It's a pretty big deal in the Torah. It's mentioned in Numbers chapter 25 because that's one of the places that Israel camped. At Shittim about to enter the promised land after 40 years of wandering around.

And they were inside of the river and everything. They were fixing to go. And then Israel surprising everybody, they mess up again in the wilderness journey. And the men begin sleeping with the Moabite women that come. And then the Moabite women influence them to worship their god Baal of Peor. And if you remember the incident, there is a mighty zealous priest named Phinehas, and he has a big spear, and he starts kabobbing people. And it's celebrated as someone who's defending the faith because he's trying to root out idolatry in a very abrupt way. After that, a plague breaks out, and the whole incident concludes with 24,000 people dying.

It's a big deal. And it was a horrifying place an event in the Bible. In other words, Shittim is the place of Israel's worst sexual sin. It's the place of one of their worst instances of idolatry. It's the place where the priests would later use to make examples in the law about what not to do. And Joel says the river that's coming forth from the house of the Lord flows there. By name, that place. He's saying the river from God's presence is going to water the cursed ground of Israel's national shame and sin and worst thing they've ever done, and it's going to be cleansed once and for all that there's no more memory of it.

And if there's no more memory of it, then there's no more accusation of it. And if there's no more accusation of it, then people can grow from the shame and the guilt and the conviction. They can grow from that and actually heal the world around them. Instead of being trapped and bound by the chains of everything that sin brings along with it. I love the image. It's beautiful. Because as believers, we know what that image feels like. It's just put in such a beautiful form. No piece of ground is permanently cursed. No memory is permanently shameful. No part of your story is so dark that the river cannot reach it.

The First Drop at Cana

If it can reach a team, it can reach through your past. Mountain dripping with wine, I love it. That brings us to John chapter 2 in the New Testament. This is the first chapter of Yeshua's public ministry in John and the first miracle he does in front of his disciples, right? And on the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee. And when the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, "They don't have any wine." Which, if you've ever been to a wedding and the wine runs out, it's a big deal, right? Now there were six stone water jars in there for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding 20 or 30 gallons.

And Jesus said to the servants, "Hey, go fill the jars with water." And when the master of the feast tasted the water, it had now become wine. And he said to the bridegroom, "Every man serves the good wine first, but you have kept the good stuff until now." Yeshua's first miracle was not healing a leper. It wasn't casting out a demon. It wasn't multiplying the bread. His first miracle was turning water into wine at a wedding when the wine had run out. He's announcing what he came to do. The kingdom of God is a wedding where the wine never runs out. The kingdom of God is the day that Joel saw. The kingdom of God is the mountain dripping with sweet wine.

And the man standing in the kitchen at Cana is the one who is going to make Joel's vision come true in a way that no one expected. And the master even comments. He says, "You've kept the good stuff for the last." Like, right? Most people read that as the compliment about the bridegroom's hospitality and I think it's more than that. The good wine, the fresh stuff has been kept until now. The mountain has been waiting for hundreds of years to start dripping since Joel. And the first drop, I would like to say, just landed in a stone jar in a kitchen in a small little place called Cana. That's what the first miracle is.

It's the down payment for the mountain that's coming. And the river that started in Cana keeps flowing all the way to the last page of the Bible in Revelation 22. And the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal flowing from the throne of God and of that lamp through the middle of the street of the city. And on the other side of the river, the tree of life with its 12 kinds of fruit yielding its fruit each month and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of all nations. The river comes forth from God's house. That's what Joel saw. The tree producing every single fruit every single month, the leaves providing healing for the nations.

Where Is Your Cursed Ground?

That's That's not new material. That's what it was in the beginning. That's the ground not being cursed anymore and everything producing and being in unity again under God's grace and rain. This is where the Bible goes. This is the story. And this is what all the prophets have been pointing to at one time or another the whole time. This is what Yeshua started at Cana and I believe finished this deployment on the cross. And it will complete on a day that we can't see yet, but we can taste it. And the question of application for this message is what do you do with the cursed ground in your life?

As cheesy as that might sound. It's a easy low-hanging fruit application, I know, but I think it carries weight. Because the message still applies. Where is the cursed ground? Where's your cursed ground? Because I'm sure you have one. We're all working through this life and journey with God and finding out more about ourselves and the things that ourselves that we don't really want to confront. The sin in our lives we really would rather not have to confront. The years the locust ate. The shittim that we'd rather leave all the way back in Numbers 25, right? That's our cursed ground. And Joel says that the river is coming there whether you like it or not.

Are you going to get on board with it? Specifically there, by name. The mountain is going to drip with wine. The years the locust ate are not lost. The God you serve in the busyness of it all. He's going to make you whole. And that's the whole message. Yeshua said something in the last supper. He said, "I will not drink of this fruit of the vine again until I drink it with you new in my father's kingdom. As I can't help but think he was pointing at Joel's mountain. He was saying that the day's coming and when it comes we're all going to drink together. We live between the wedding at Cana and the mountain right now.

The down payment's been made, the mountain is dripping, the river is starting to flow and the cursed ground in every single one of our lives, the valley of Shittim in your story is on the river's route. It's on its way. And we're going to walk out of here in just a little bit back out there into the outside world where the world still groans. And it's a world where the locusts still come and the ground still produces thorns. But we walk out as a people who have heard the prophet and we see the down payment. And that should change your perspective of how not only you view the world but you view who?

Every single person in it. Despite the labels that you want to put on them, despite the feelings that you want to have towards them despite what you think about the way that they act or their clothes that they wear or the past you're imagining that they must have in order for you to come to the conclusion of who you think they are, to not want to engage or give grace to them. They're out there as well. And we're walking out with the people who have heard the message and know what's coming. And that should show through our hope. And our hope should change our behavior. Taste the fresh wine and know that because the locusts have come doesn't mean restoration isn't.

And so with that said I hope this week that you will remember the hope that we have in Yeshua. I hope this week you will remember the hope that we have that God actually does what he says he does. I hope this week you will be reminded that if we are God's chosen then we have the Holy Spirit of power within us, and that should be changing things. And that starts with acknowledging what needs to be cleansed. It starts with acknowledging what needs to change in your heart. Because you can't fix a world if you don't change. All you can do is act the part and not actually deliver. And that's why churches have a bad reputation.

So, let's not be that. Let's focus on change. Let's get with the Lord. Let's meditate. Let's pray this week. And ask God, God, make me a receptacle for this mountain that is dripping with this sweet wine. So, if you please stand, we'll conclude with worship and prayer. And if you need prayer for anything this week regarding the message or not, guys, we have a prayer team on either side of the stage, and you can just walk up, and you will have someone with complete empathy for you to stand with you and pray with you during this time. Maybe you came in today with something that you've been carrying around for a long time, and maybe you forgot how heavy it was until today.

If that's you, guys, we have this mock altar down here. It's a symbolic altar where you can come, you can kneel down, and symbolically take that thing and place it there, and make a commitment to the Lord that I'm going to walk away and leave it there behind for good. This is what we're called to do, guys. Let's be the soldiers of Christ and march forward. Avinu Malkeinu, our Father and our King. Father, I thank you for this opportunity that we can come together in unity around the name of Yeshua, and that your Holy Spirit would work even in this moment to further conform ourselves to the image of everything Yeshua is.