Faithbase

Hey everybody, it's Danny, I want to say thank you for tuning in to the Heart Way podcast and I want to give a special thanks to those of you who are tuning in from really all over the world. We're so grateful that you are a part of our community and that you listen in on an ongoing basis. If you've been encouraged by what you've heard, I want to ask you to share this with a friend. You never know the impact that one of these messages can have in another person's life. And if you yourself have been impacted and you'd like to continue to partner with us to keep this work going, check us out at heartwaychurch.com slash give. Every dollar that you give goes a really long way towards helping us do what it is that we do. Well, we love you. Really hope you enjoy the podcast. All right, good morning, everybody. How's everybody feeling this morning? Good. I love it. I love it. I feel just such good energy and like just, I don't know, it feels good in here today. So I'm excited to share with all of you in this time of centering prayer this morning. You guys really don't know how special centering prayer really is. Just two weeks ago, I had a little situation that kind of like caused turbulence with my emotions and my feelings. And I did the best thing that I knew to do, and it was to go to God. And in the past, I didn't do that for a long time because I don't know why for some reason it's hard to be vulnerable and just be fully yourself with anyone or anything or even yourself, most importantly. So I went to God in time of centering prayer because for me, prayer, it was always hard for me to pray because words can't even describe sometimes what we feel inside. What we feel inside just needs to be experienced and felt. And that's why I love centering prayer because it brings us back to our truth, back to ourselves. And I want to read to you guys this verse that I came across that I thought was so beautiful and just really is such a representation of what centering prayer is for us. It's in Matthew 11, 28 through 30. It says, come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest in your souls. Isn't that beautiful? I love that because that's literally what centering prayer does for you. It's rest for your soul. You know, when I had this situation a few weeks ago, I wanted to live from my ego. Everything inside of me wanted to just live from the mind and live from all the stories my mind was telling me. But then I quickly realized, like, no, Emily, you have worked so hard to be free and to live in my love, in God's love. So the importance of centering prayer is just so important, even when you don't want to do it. It really just brings you back to your truth, back to that God center. That's why it's called centering prayer. You recenter yourself, you're back aligned with God. So I want us to get into a comfortable position. I'm going to ask that we all close our eyes. I want us to invite God into this moment right now. Let's release any tension we are holding on to. Let's unclench our jaws, release any tension in your shoulders, get comfortable. There's nowhere else you need to be, there's nothing else you need to do other than be here right now, in this moment. Let's take in three deep breaths together. The peace you're searching for, the love you're in search for, it's already within you, and it's right here in this moment. God wants to remind you of your truth and your power. You are love. You are made of love. You are loving awareness. Whatever stories your mind is telling you, do not attach, do not judge, simply let them float on by and bring yourself back to your breath. Allow your soul to find rest in God. Allow God's spirit to be within you. All the heaviness that you're carrying, let it all go. It doesn't serve you. Release any judgment, any shame, anything that weighs you down, let it all go. Float in the sea of love. Allow this moment to remind you that you are here with purpose, you are here with intention. Allow God's spirit to be within you. You are worthy of God's love in and through every moment, no matter the circumstance. You are radiant and a beautiful beam of light. Even when you don't see it, your light is shining so bright. You are radiant and a beautiful beam of light. You are radiant and a beautiful beam of light. I hope you feel God's ever-flowing love in this moment. God surrounds you with love and grace. Accept this love. Do you take this gift of freedom, this gift of peace? Let's live from the heart and not attaching to the mind. The mind will tell us all of these stories, but the heart will lead us to God, will guide us to love, and will guide us to our truth. Whenever we're ready, I'm going to go ahead and take a deep breath altogether. Whenever you feel ready, go ahead and open up your eyes. Amen. Thank you. Listen, y'all been killing me with this bishop title. Good morning, Harway. How y'all doing today? Listen, y'all already know how I am. You know, I need a little bit more crowd participation. You know, so for those that don't know me, my name is Clifford, and it is truly an honor to be up here just to be with you guys in live, in person, because I did a message back in August, and it was just a camera, and I hated it. Like, I am an extrovert, so I need your spirit. I need your energy. That's what I feed off of. So, truly, it's been, it is truly an honor just to be here in your presence, right, as we sit in the presence of God. So, like I said, crowd participation for me. So, you guys can see the, oh, well, it's not up there. Today's title of the message is called Memoirs of Our Scars. There it is. So, before we jump deep into the message, I got a question for you. How many of you guys got some crazy scars? Huh? All right. So, you tell me a little bit about your scar. All right, tell everybody. You can give just a quick one. All right. That's that scar. Anybody else? Anybody else? Phil, what you got? Man. That's what I'm talking about. Those scars, the scars that we have. So, you can't really see this scar that I have on this finger. It's a small scar, but I got a crazy story to it. All right, so I'm about 10 or 12, right? Over my buddy's house, he's like, you know, showing me his new BB gun, right? And I'm like, yo, that's pretty cool. But he's like, listen, you know, as long as you don't, you know, pump the BB gun, you can just shoot it, and the BB will just roll out into your hand. So I'm like, cool, you know? I was like, yo, won't you let me borrow the BB gun? There's some stuff around my backyard that I want to shoot and stuff. So I'm like, got the BB gun. My mom doesn't know, my dad doesn't know that I got the BB gun in the house, right? So this day, I'm like, oh, I'm gonna pull the BB gun out, and I am going to do what he said, you know, just shoot. Now, I can't remember if I had pumped it the day before or earlier that day, I just don't know. So I decide to pull the trigger. I pull the trigger, the BB goes in and comes and sits right here, right? My, so I stumble, it's just me and my sister at the house, right? I stumble out of the room. I fall over one of the dining room chairs, hit the ground, don't even put my hands out to stop myself. My sister thinks I'm playing. She's like, bravo, bravo, good acting, good acting. I'm like, I'm not acting, like, I'm out of it, right? She sees the blood, she freaks out. She calls my mom and dad, they rush home, take me to the hospital, take me into surgery. They remove the BB, get a tetanus shot. That's that, that little dot that you can't even see, but you can feel it is there, right? And so that's like my crazy scar story. But today, I got another question. You know, I'm a crowd participation. How many of you have scars that we can't see? Right? The scars that are from broken relationships, a tragedy, an addiction, a religious or church trauma, from judgment or some disappointment, some failure in your life that you're holding on to, those scars that you can't see. You see, for me, my scar, or one of them anyway, was this feeling of not enough. So over the last four years, I've had this challenge in growth within my professional life and financial growth, right? It just feels like there's just been this block, right? So for me, being a construction manager, owning my own business, we put together all these proposals to be able to hit this deadline, right? And so we go through and we put all this energy and we're making sure that everything is perfect and the presentation is immaculate to get to this submission date. On a side note, I've talked to so many of my colleagues and what happens to our bodies is kind of crazy because, again, all of our energy, everything we go into to get to this submission date, the very next day, most of us actually get sick because our immune system is lower because we've put everything in just to submit and then after that, our bodies are just weak. And so for me, we go through this process and about four years ago, going through the process, you take a couple losses. You're like, oh, crap, that sucks, right? And then you're like, all right, let's go through the analytical part of it, right? Let's understand how we can maybe curtail the proposal a little bit better, help convey the message to the people that are making the decisions that, all right, we really understand the scope, we understand how to approach this project. So you go through and you make those changes. Now, we've partnered with other companies, this company and that company and some that we've pursued on our own and I'm like, we keep taking these losses and I'm like, what is happening? So I start to do what you normally do after this point, you start to do a self-evaluation, right? You're trying to examine within myself, like, have I been screwing something over or screw somebody over in business and done something wrong? I mean, I've had many a talks with Pastor Danny, like, bruh, I don't get it because we keep taking these losses, right? Now, granted, God has been good to us and our business is doing well, but it's those larger projects that is gonna like catapult to the next level is where we've been taking these losses. Like, I even went to my wife and was like, okay, I'm just confessing everything, baby. Listen, I think I maybe looked at this woman over here a little too long. Like, I'm confessing everything because I'm like, I need to move everything out of the way that I feel like is hindering my blessing. Like, I'm like, baby, she looks at me and she's like, really? She starts laughing. She's like, that's been bothering you? She was like, get over it. It's cool. She's laughing at me and I'm like pouring my heart out because I'm trying to figure out what the heck is going on with this block. I'm feeling like I'm cursed. I'm feeling like I'm the black sheep because when I started to look at everything and I'm trying to examine what's happening, I start to look at the common denominator. It's me. Because we've partnered with this company over here going after this kind of projects. We've partnered with this company over here to go after this kind of projects or we've gone after the projects ourselves and it just seems like where there's a great opportunity, there becomes a great wall that stops that opportunity. And I just could not, cannot understand what the issue is and I started to feel like not enough. I started to feel like have this bitterness and this loss of hope like, should I even go through this process to put in this time, all of this effort and this energy, the late nights to wanna continue to have the same outcome? Why? I got to the point that I even felt depression knocking at the door. I even opened the door a little bit because I felt myself wanting to retract, to go into seclusion, walking into my office, putting my head down on my desk, a feeling of a little bit of hopelessness. And it gives you this feeling of not enough. But I had to know that I serve a better God than just what's going on in me. Galatians 6.17 says, from now on, let no one cause me trouble for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus. To be able to share the scars that we go through, there's the wound that has created it, but to share all of that, we have to be a little bit vulnerable. We have to be a little bit open. We have to be willing to go in and dig a little bit deeper to see what that wound was. There's this quote, don't know who said it, but they said, never be ashamed of a scar. It simply means that you were stronger than whatever tried to hurt you. See, we all know the story of Jesus after being crucified, hung on that cross for three days, and then he rose again. We heard about the stone being rolled away, and then the disciples are trying to figure out what to do next. They're all sitting around in a house because they've invested about three years of their time giving themselves, putting their family on the back burner to follow this man named Jesus, who said, I am the truth and the light, but is now dead. What kind of scar did that leave on them? But then Jesus comes into the room and Thomas, we all know the story of doubting Thomas. We've probably said that so many times, wants to feel and see the scars because he just doesn't believe. But at that moment, I think for a second, we lose sight of Jesus. We lose sight of Jesus, and the whole story becomes just about Thomas. You see, Jesus was strong enough to be able to say, come, come see my scars, come touch and feel my scars. He was not ashamed of the scars that he had. He had to be able to show us that there is a way for you to have this, go through this pain, but to be able to share it with those that are around you. He didn't stop. He didn't stop them from and hide. He didn't put his hands in his pockets. He wanted you to feel it. Don't be ashamed of the scars that you have. I got one. How many of you have this scar of a prayer unanswered? Or a prayer unanswered the way you wanted it to be answered? The scar of maybe a healing of someone that was on their deathbed and God still decided to call them home. The scar of a career opportunity that just faded away and did not come. The scar of a significant other that you've been praying about this relationship, but it is just broken and God took it away. And we're asking God to bring it back. Or maybe for some of you, you've been praying about a baby. You've been praying about that new life and it just hasn't happened yet. Or it hasn't happened. And that scar is just working on you. It is sitting on your body and you're like, you can't understand what to do with it. November 16th was the day I got a scar. Seven o'clock in the morning, I wake up, look at my phone and I have a bunch of missed calls. Text messages, WhatsApp messages. And see, I used to turn my phone off when I go to bed. Because don't want emails and notifications to be pinging and stuff like that. But I wake up and I have all of these messages and phone calls that started about two o'clock in the morning. As soon as I saw it, I knew something wasn't right. I call my sister back and I'm like, what's up? She tells me that my dad is dead. She tells me that people broke into his house three guys came into the house and they shot and killed dad. He was 63. Sitting there in that moment, trying to understand why, what. Couldn't stop crying. Just talked to him. That was a Monday morning. I just talked to him Saturday. He did his normal calls that he does. Hey, just checking in to see how you guys are doing. Spoke to me, spoke to my wife and the kids. For you guys that haven't been going the hard way, my very first message, my dad was here. Preparing for this message, I would have called him and told him, hey, I'm getting ready to teach. So that way he can check out. So he can hear the message. I know he's smiling. It's still a fresh scar. But I can't stop it from, and let that wound and that scar stop me. What am I supposed to do? Let it extinguish the fire of hope inside of me? Do we let it just stamp out the dream or the calling that's over our lives? Do we let that scar take the place of who we're called to be? Or do we find ourselves to take that scar and let it cover the rest of our body to be able to find some level of comfort in this growth paralysis that it creates? No, I can't. I can't. So what do we do with that scar? Let it speak. Let that scar speak. Let it tell the story. Don't push it down. Don't cover it up. You see, the way the body works, right? So if you get a cut here, the body creates the skin that goes over it. But you got to clean it out. You got to be able to speak. You got to be able to talk about it so that way it can heal correctly because otherwise it's just infected. And then you have a scar over an infection. Clean it out. Speak. Don't hold it. Let it continue to let whatever happen. Let it not be in vain. Don't push it down. I'm begging you. I'm urging you because when that scar does what it's supposed to do, that skin is a little bit stronger. It's a little bit more resilient. It is thicker than what it was when you first, before you got cut. You are stronger. You are more resilient. You are what God created you to be. You are going through these things, not just for some happenstance. You know, truth be told, we go through these things in life and some of them ain't even about us. They're for us to be able to go through these experiences so that someone else can live these things vicariously through us. So that way we can share this story. By not telling your story, you may be hindering somebody else to be able to grow and heal. Share. It is tough. You have to be vulnerable. Jesus said, come, feel my scars. This is the scar that I took for your salvation. Don't let that scar stop you. Let that scar propel you. Let it be the driving force, the elevator to raise you up to the next level because your story is important. Your story is meant to be heard by one, by ten, by a hundred, by a billion people. It is meant to be heard because but one life. It could be just one life to stop somebody from taking their own life. Stop one life from taking another's life. Be strong in our scars. They will help you weather the storm. They will help you be better. They will help you grow. Second Corinthians 1210 says, that is why, for Christ's sake, the light and weakness and insults and hardships and persecutions and difficulties for when I am weak, then I am strong. If you don't take anything from my message today, God's message is these scars were never meant to beat you. The things that happened were never meant to stop you. They were meant to help you. It don't feel like it. It don't seem like it. But they will. You have to be able to relax and rest in God so that way he can continue the work that he started. Understanding why what happened to my dad happened in the fashion and everything that it did, I may never know. But I carry his name. And so his name, I will be who I'm supposed to be. For him, for me, for my family, for each of you. So where do we go? The battle is not over. It's time to fight. It's time to fight for our confidence. It's time to fight for our reassurance. It's time to fight for strength. It's time to fight for who you are. We don't give up. There's no giving up. Our God did not give up. In this situation with my dad, they had already taken something precious to me. They took him away from me. I'm not giving them anything else. I'm not giving them my feeling of wanting to go and hide. I'm not giving them my strength. I'm not giving them my reassurance. I am not giving them my confidence. I'm not giving them a darn thing. Nothing else. Why? Why would I do that? No, you took something. Now it's my turn. I'm taking everything back. My dad is here with me, standing right next to me. My dad is standing right here inside of me. My God is standing right here next to me and inside of me and he's right there with you. So let's fight. Let's fight to find peace, hope, joy. But and let's fight to find our healing. Not in the scar. But in the healer. This part right here is off. I just want to step to you. I can see it in your eyes. I can see it in the nods. I can't see your mouth or your expressions of smiling or of your your face down here does most of the expressions, but I can see it in your eyes right now. There is something you are wanting to have that healing that you have that scar from. And so I'm telling you today you can call me. You can call Pastor Danny. You can call Emily. You can call us. You can if you don't want to talk to us, talk to somebody. So that way your healing can begin. Because your healing leads to the next step. So that way you can be great. Just like the song from worship. They just said it happens. Just how do I walk on water? Just one step at a time. How do I go through this healing? Just one step at a time. It hurts. I'm not going to lie to you. But what's on the other side? Is peace to hurt no more. Let me pray for you. My God, I just want to thank you for today. Thank you for being right next to us in all that we do, all that we have prayed for, all that we have asked for. My God, we just want to thank you for healing. We thank you even for the rough times to be able to help us to grow our resilience and our strength. Lord, we just thank you for being right there with us. Never forsaken us, but holding our hands. Let us never release the grip that we have on your hand as we walk through these challenges in life. Even when we don't understand, Lord, help us to be able to find the road of peace and patience and guidance and strength as you walk us besides still waters or even raging storms. We love you, Lord. I ask that you just touch everybody that is here, Lord, in these chairs or may listen to the podcast. Help them to know that they can be healed by one step at a time. Let them know that they have a ear ready and willing to listen to be able to help them to understand how to walk through these challenging times. Help us to be able to go out and impact the world and help us to, once we have gone through healing, Lord, help us to be an ear for somebody else. Help us to be willing to tell our story so that other lives may be healed and transformed. That is the conveyance of what you have done with the giving us of the scriptures to be able to understand that these are a way to be able to tell the story that we can then turn around and tell our stories. We ask this in your son Jesus name, we pray. Thank you guys so much. We love you guys and have a good day. Enjoy the rest of your Sunday.