They go throw it over her mom’s and you’re playing catch with them and they like, they put their hand like this and bounce off, hits him in the face.
You know, you’re supposed to have your glove up like this, and I like this and they’re, they’re out here trying to catch it, hit something and they start crying. I’m like, don’t cry to me. Turn your glove up right away. Catch the ball. You’re never, let’s go. Suck it up. It sounds harsh, doesn’t it? But it’s real. There’s a, there’s a little bit of truth to that. I’m not sure if my kids were looking at me like so just because I want them to catch it and I’m tossing it to them, doesn’t guarantee they will catch it. So feel me here. Peace and Goodwill towards men. In other words Mt. Carmel Church, God’s throwing peace and Goodwill towards men, but that doesn’t guarantee they’re going to catch it. Just because you’re tossing it someone doesn’t mean they’re going to catch it. And there’s a lot of factors that can be evolved. I want to illustrate this a little bit. Let’s see. Chris, could you come up and, uh, Kevin, how about you? Yeah, you guys would be great. You guys would be great. You have two of those. Kevin here. You,
Oh, she’s cute.
Oh Mt. Carmel Church, I missed it with my Eagles fan. So anyway. All right, so here’s what happens sometimes. Let me, there’s, there’s some things that you can control and some things you can’t control. What I want to talk to you about today in the Christmas catch is that you can control one thing. You can’t control what you catch. You can’t control what’s being thrown at you because I’m going to use him in this illustration and just because I was hard on him, Kevin is going to be Jesus and Chris is going to be the devil. Okay? See I made up for that. So Kevin is going to be Jesus. Chris going to be the devil. So now, just because just because someone’s throwing something at you doesn’t mean they’re the only one throwing something at you. So Jesus is throwing peace and Goodwill toward towards me and I, I’ve got choose whether I’m going to catch it or not, but the same time that Jesus is throwing peace and Goodwill towards you, the devil is throwing anxiety and condemnation towards you and you and I gotta decide which one we’re going to catch.
We can’t stop it from being thrown Mt. Carmel Church. We’d like to think we live in a world where only good things are coming my way. Wake up. It’s not going to be like that. There’s going to be times for things are thrown your way either from, from the enemy, from your own thought can throw things your way. Sometimes the person, the worst person to throw things in my way with my own mind is no devil. It’s nobody else. Just my own thoughts. And sometimes it’s other people. So it’s going to happen, but just because things are being prone, sometimes what I’ve found is we’re catching the wrong thing. Have you ever done this? You had something like, uh, you want somebody to catch something. Maybe you got something all nasty, slimy and dirty and somebody has got their back to you and you want them to catch it.
So we used to do this Mt. Carmel Church. Now I’ve got some twisted issues, but just pray for me. We just, we pick it up and we start to toss it to him. We’d say catch and they turned around. And the first instinct is just to catch it right until the history. Ah, that’s gross. Well, the only way you can get them to catch something they don’t want is you have to use secrecy or deception. You have to catch them off guard. If they see it coming, they won’t catch it. And here’s what I believe happens. Sometimes the enemy gets us to catch something that we don’t need to catch because we don’t see it coming. He uses deception. He uses other people. He uses weakness in our moments he uses when we’re down, when we’re discouraged, when we’re just flat out tired and he’ll toss us something sometime and we turn around though to do. We catch it
[inaudible]
and we know it’s not good for us, but we just caught it anyway. Here’s nothing happens. IWU throw me something. All right, so sometimes we catch things that the enemies given us, other people give us because we don’t know any better and we get so comfortable with it, we get so used to it. Here’s what can happen Mt. Carmel Church. Some of you are holding onto something today is what I believe God’s wanting to help you with. You’re holding onto some things you’ve caught in your life. A hurt, a disappointment, a discouragement, a tragedy. It could be something done to you. Something you’ve accepted for yourself, something that’s outside of your control or something in your control. I don’t know what it is, but you’re holding onto something and because you’re holding onto that fear, that guilt, that condemnation, that anxiety, that worry, that stress because you’re holding onto it. Even if God is throwing peace and Goodwill towards you, you can’t catch it because you’re holding onto something else
that’s good.
God’s trying to throw peace to you Mt. Carmel Church. He’s trying to throw healing to you, trying to throw restoration to you, but you can’t catch what he’s throwing because you’re holding on so tightly and God’s got two words for you today. Drop it, drop it like it’s hot. You got to get rid of it. Got to get rid of it. You’re like, well, it’s just not that easy. Well, it’s not that hard.
Yeah,
it’s not difficult. It’s simple. Nobody said it was easy. It’s we just at some point, if I’m going to catch what God is tossing my way, I have to be a good toe.