Love that. Man, listen, if you're at The Hunt Club right now, man, we are so thankful for you. Man, really, honestly, we love to tell the story of what you're doing. If you're at any of our campuses right now, you have been a part of this story.

You are starting other campuses. Mm. And our heart in this series, “We Are One Church,” is to connect you again with the story of all that happens on Sundays. Because it can feel sometimes like you're just in one room, but really you're in five different rooms at the same time.

Mm. And all the folks watching online, we welcome you as well. This week's a little bit unique because many of you already know Gray. I am so thankful for Gray.

I was texting Gray last night and one of the things I said was just, "Hey man, thank you for carrying the load of teaching with me." Mm. Gray's an incredible teacher. When he walks in the room, he brings laughter. He has such a heart for the unchurched.

That's who we are. And every time we're writing messages, we'll run that by Gray. And he'll say, "Hey, well, I love this angle. I love this thought." And so, I want to do this just in case you haven't connected with a little bit more of Gray and his story.

I want him to share a little bit, just how he got here in the season of life he's in, and also want to help you meet his family. I want you to see them as well. So. Yeah, so as Andy said, well, there's my family.

Before we get there, Andy Pittman said I was his babysitter. Yeah. There was not any supervision happening in that scenario. Yep.

Zero. Yeah. I can't be held responsible for him. But that was my family.

My wife, Lauren, and she's a therapist here in town. My son, Judah, is 14, is about to start ninth grade. And poor Judah. Any of you, you raise your hand, on all of our campuses, you're the oldest sibling?

Yeah. Mom and Dad got to practice on you? Yeah. Yeah.

Judah, he's it. He's our only child, and so he has to give us a lot of grace because we're just first-time parenting a 14-year-old. But one thing I love about our crew, our small crew, is my wife always says, "We got to stick together." Yeah. Come hell or high water, and so, I think that's a pretty constant trait in our family, so.

Listen, I loved, you guys saw the video, and I feel like that's our version of MTV Cribs each week. You're seeing these different homes. It's pretty nice. But one of the things that got my attention was the Mowing Mafia.

Mm-hmm. Can you tell us a little more? Yeah, and I've referenced them before. There's a group of guys who have the spiritual gift of driving zero turns.

And that's their words. And then they saw that field, and we had tried to do a couple things, and realized that there's broken glass and holes, and it was a lawsuit waiting to happen. And so, "Man, we can fix that." And so they spent the past two years, they keep it groomed, they filled in holes. I think one of the guys told me they brought in eight loads of dirt filling in holes over the past couple years.

And even my heart is that that space would be able to be used for the community, and I think for the first time this summer, we got a local high school that they're going to kick off their senior year out there. Oh, nice. And so that's pretty cool. Listen, part of our desire in this series is to connect you with our other campuses.

If you haven't ever been to The Hunt Club, we want to invite you to go. All right? Every Sunday, 9:30 and 11, you need to see that campus and meet the folks that make that campus so special. Here's our heartbeat behind this series.

We're in the Book of Psalms, and many of you were with us on Wednesday in our men's group and our women's group. We're continuing in the same book, so go ahead and open up your Bible if you have it with you. We're going to be in Psalms 37. Yep.

And Gray is going to teach today. If you don't have your Bible with you, just go to the Venture app, and I want you to follow along with us. But look, before we get there, I'm going to pray for us, okay? So, let's pray, and then we'll open up God's word.

God, I thank you so much for the chance to worship, and I thank you of a chance to get led by our Hunt Club team this morning. And so, God, as we open up your word, we pray you would speak to us. God, I thank you for this passage that talks about the way that you delight in us. Father, we have prayed over all of our rooms and all of our chairs, and our heart is that we would understand just how much you love and you delight in your creation, your sons, and your daughters.

So today, God, I thank you for Gray. I thank you for his leadership. God, I thank you for the story of who we are, one church in all these different campuses. But God, our heart is to understand the way that you delight in us.

And so it's in your name we pray. Amen. Amen. Well, something that wasn't, well, you got a shot of it in that little Cribs video, was the disco ball.

I'm pretty sure The Hunt Club is, I know it's the only Venture campus and possibly the only church in Mississippi that has a disco ball. Actually, we have two. And every time our production team is over there, they're like, "Hey, you want us to leave them, take them down?" I'm like, "No, leave them." Because what they don't know is every now and then, I told you, I grew up in the '90s, graduated high school in 1999. Every now and then, my wife and I, Lauren, we'll go up there late at night.

Oh. We'll kick on that disco light, put on something like some Brian McKnight. "Make a dream come true." And just relive prom. So we leave them up there.

That's not true. So, we are going to be in Psalm 37, but before we get there, I want to get everybody on the same page, regardless of where you are on your faith journey, churched, unchurched, Christian, atheist, somewhere in between. And I think I can do that with this question right here. What do you want?

Now, depending on what's going on in life, you may have a lot of different answers to that. Maybe you're like, "Man, we need a new dishwasher." You're thinking in practical terms. You may be, "We need a new house. We need a bigger house." Anybody, you want a new car?

Anybody say that? Maybe? No? All right, you like your cars.

You guys are awesome here at Lincoln Road. I always want a new vehicle, and always get told no. But what about maybe, and don't raise your hand on this, new job? "Man, I need a new job." Maybe it's a new girlfriend, new boyfriend.

Maybe it is the first girlfriend or boyfriend. But nonetheless, we all want. And when it comes to stuff, like the stuff that we want, if the algorithm ever gets ahold of what we want, isn't that a problem? Yeah.

Let me show you. I really don't know how this came up on my Amazon. But this is a coffee mug. It's 22 pounds.

And I was like, "How cool is that?" Now, if you can see, it's $100, okay? And I was like, "Man, that's super cool. I want that." And so I showed it to my wife and I convinced them, I convinced my wife and my son to get this for me for Father's Day. But that's next week, so we got an early Father's Day.

Guys, this thing- ... like it needs to come with a straw. It is crazy. I told my son last night, I filled it up with water, I said, "I'll give you $100 right now if you can drink it without spilling it." He didn't get $100. I wouldn't either.

You start quivering. But I wanted this, and now I got it, and I don't know what I'm going to do with it- ... because I can't use it. But this is something that I wanted. Sorry.

It's a little bottom-heavy. It's got some junk in its trunk. But we all want stuff. And there's really three broad categories when you talk about wants.

The stuff, that may be clothes or maybe you're a tech guy. There was a season in my life early on, every time Apple came out with an iPhone, I pre-ordered it. Even going way back before they pre-ordered, for the second iPhone, it was the iPhone 3G, had the glossy black, rounded edges. Oh, so good.

I was second in line. The reason I was second in line, because I didn't want to tell people I was first in line. At 3:30 in the morning at an AT&T store in Daphne, Alabama. Because I wanted it.

I was a techie. Maybe you're a sneakerhead, and you're always into shoes and the latest fashion. So there's stuff, and then there's relationships. Again, maybe you want a girlfriend, a boyfriend, a husband, a wife, a new one of those.

I don't know. But you want those things or those relationships. And then there's our experiences that we want. Maybe you want to go to college.

You want to be a doctor, a lawyer, a business person. You want to own a business, or you want to go a certain place. I'd love to climb Mount Everest. That's something I want to do.

I won't do it, but I want to. Swap the A and the O. But those are things or experiences that we want. Then there's even wants about our identity.

If we got any college students that are here, or even adults, anybody ever change their major? Yeah. Yeah, you wanted to do this, then you decided you wanted to do something else? My oldest brother, I didn't ask his permission before I shared this.

Hmm. I'm here now. He went to school, his degree is in wildlife fisheries. It's what he wanted to do.

Guess what he does now? He's a therapist. Not with animals. It's crazy.

When we start thinking about all the things that we want, there's some realities about our wants, and I think you can relate to these. So my wants can lead me to do stupid things. True. You've probably got a story, right?

Or my greatest regrets will almost always, and I really think it's always, but I didn't want to speak in concrete here, my greatest regrets will almost always be connected to something I wanted. You thought you wanted that relationship. That middle school crush that you thought was going to be there for your entire life. Amen.

Sometimes what I want in the immediate can keep me from what I really want in the future. Right. I don't know if anybody listens to Coldplay. I'm not necessarily a Coldplay fan, but they've got a song that I love, and this line just resonates so deeply in me.

And it's in the beginning, it says, "When you get what you want," like you got what you wanted, "but not what you need." The name of that song is "Fix You." And I was like, "Man, that's it." Here's what I wanted, but turns out, it's not what I really needed. And what I got in the immediate kept me From what I really wanted. And so we can come to this conclusion about our wants. We can't always trust our wanter.

We can't. Sometimes our wants, and we get it right. Sometimes our wants lead us down a road. But here's what we also know, is that the stakes are really high when it comes to the things that we desire and the things that we want.

That they carry significant consequences that don't just impact the now, but they impact the future. And how about this? They don't just impact us, oftentimes they impact the people around us as well. And so this morning, what I want to do is we're going to go to Psalm chapter 37, and before we get there, you can go ahead and turn there.

We're going to look at only one verse, okay? So you're like, "Well, I feel like I'm getting short-changed." So if that's you, let me give you a quick summary of Psalm 37. It starts out, it's written by King David, and he's telling the people to quit comparing. He's like, "Hey, you see these people that are being successful, and all it does is make you worry and it makes you envious." So basically, this is my interpretation.

He says, "Hey, worry about yourself. Quit worrying about others, worry about yourself." And then he tells us, he gives us some things to worry about. "Hey, why don't you work on this? Work on you." So he gives us some things, and that's verses three through nine.

And then the rest of the chapter is David just laying out the consequences if you decide to walk with God or if you decide to go your own way, and there's very real destinations either way. And so he just kind of is like, "Hey, this is how this plays out." So there's Psalm 37. We're going to come back and we're going to look at one verse, and then we're going to look at three words within that one verse. All right?

So Psalm 37, verse four. Here we go. We're going to spend the next few minutes here. "Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart." Isn't that what we want?

The desires of my heart. It doesn't matter if you believe in God or not. Yeah, sign me up for that. And doesn't it feel transactional?

And I like transactional because it's measurable. There's not a lot of emotion involved. I do this, I get this. It's simple.

But David says, "Here's what you need to do. You need to delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart." And the first word that we've got to unpack is this word desires. Now, when you hear the word desire, just to make sure you're tracking with me, this is our wants. We said our wants can lead us to do stupid things.

What we mean is our desires. We say that oftentimes our greatest regrets are because of something we wanted. It's because of something we desired. We said that oftentimes, what we desire or what we want in the immediate keeps us from what we really want later on.

It's our desires in the immediate. So these are interchangeable. All right? And why is that true?

Why do so often that the things that we want cause us to do stupid things that we regret and possibly jeopardize our future? It's because our desires can be so easily derailed. And there's two major dangers, and the first one is this about our desires, is that we have disordered desires. The things we desire, probably most of the time, aren't bad.

It's the priority and the value we place on them. Let me just tell you, if you're single and you're dating, I don't care what age you are, this would be the best example I can give you. Or if you're married and you place your spouse at the number one spot in your life, that's disordered. And here's the thing about our disordered desires, and I want you to hear this.

Our disordered desires diminish our desire's capacity to bring satisfaction. So what I mean is, is the thing that our desire's supposed to fulfill in us, it gets diminished when we get things out of order. And so going back to that example, if we've got a person at the number one spot in our life, and Jesus tells us in Matthew 6:33 to seek Him first, then at some point, that person is going to let us down because they're not God. They can't deliver at that capacity.

And now our relationship with this person is diminished. The desire is diminished because we've put something on them they were never intended to carry. Disordered desires. I'll give you one from my life.

About seven years ago, my life revolved around training, working out. Not only my life, my family's life. And this is something I enjoy, something I still enjoy. And I was listening to a podcast one day, and they were talking about how people say they don't have time to take care of their bodies and their health.

And this guy he said, "There's two 5:00s in the day." So I would always work out in the afternoons when our son was getting out of school. My wife was still working. My schedule was a lot more flexible. And so when I was there, all the responsibilities were on her.

And so just going back, this guy said, "There's two 5:00s in the day." He said, "There's 5:00 a.m. and there's 5:00 p.m. Everybody needs you at 5:00 p.m. as a husband and a father." Nobody needs you at 5:00 AM. And he wasn't even talking about my scenario in life, and dude, it hit me hard. And I realized that I had a disordered desire, and because of that, I placed my wife in a position to resent me, to resent working out, because I got everything out of order.

That's what disordered desires do. They diminish everything. And then there's a second danger when it comes to our desires. It is our distorted desires.

And this is basically when we take any good gift, any good thing that God has given us, and we use it outside of His design. Some things that come to mind: sex, food, relationships in general, money. When we take things that are supposed to be good gifts. Hey, look, I'm being facetious, but I'm not.

We can do this with the sunshine. We need vitamin D, what do we do? We put vegetable oil on us and go lay out in the sun and get cancer. As humans, we can distort anything that God intended to be a good gift.

And here's the truth about our distorted desires, is that eventually, they bring devastation to our lives. It may be our health, physical health, mental health, relationships. This is where addiction starts to come in. It brings devastation.

And so again, where we come back to this place, we go, I can't always trust my want or I can't always trust the things I desire, and when things have gone awry, it's because I've had them disordered or I've had them distorted. And so how do I fix that? What do I need to do next? Help me.

And so we go back to Psalm 37:4, "Take delight in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your..." Everybody say it with me. "Heart." "Heart." It's our second word. Our heart. Now here's what we got to understand.

In the Old Testament, the heart was responsible for a lot. So initially, obviously they understood the heart as the muscle that pumps blood through the body. They also thought that the heart is where, because they didn't have the concept of the brain. If you could imagine a human heart that had the texture of a brain, that's their mindset.

So the thoughts come from our heart. Emotions they thought came from the heart. Choices came from the heart. Now, knowing what we know now, we know that we may say emotion comes from the heart, and we say, he put his whole heart into it or his heart is broken.

But we know that not only do we have a heart, we've got a brain, and in the brain there's the limbic system that manages all of our emotions. We know that. We know that thoughts happen in the brain, in the prefrontal cortex. We know that.

We know that our choices happen in the prefrontal cortex in the brain. And then we also understand the physical capacity of our heart. So we understand it differently, but what the Old Testament writers are trying to convey as they thought about the heart was it is your system of belief. A combination of all of that, your thoughts and your emotions and your choices as a system of belief.

And so let me show you a couple other references. Proverbs 4:23, "Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it." So above all else, guard your belief system. You got to pay attention to what's coming into your mind, your eyes, your ears, your influences. Jeremiah 17:9, "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.

Who can understand it?" Jeremiah's a prophet and he's writing to a group of people, and he sees them doing all this crazy, wicked stuff that they are convinced, it's a belief system, is right. And he's like, "Guys, it's deceiving you." And so here are the implications of our heart. Number one, we live from our hearts. So again, when we say hearts, what I'm talking about, that's our belief system.

We live from that. The things that we believe to be true. Not only that, we have to also understand that our hearts can deceive us. And because of that, our hearts have to be protected so that they don't deceive us.

Because again, you've been absolutely convinced, I've been absolutely convinced this is what I want, and have been dead wrong. Because I wasn't protecting my heart. So maybe the question we don't need to ask is what do we want? Actually, before I tell you that, let's go back to Psalm 37:4.

So here's our last word then. If we've got to protect our hearts, if our hearts can deceive us, if we live from our hearts, "Take delight in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart." Well, how do we protect our hearts? Delight Delight in the Lord. Now, I stink at this.

Anytime the Bible uses words like delight, it is like I am bumping up against a wall. When we sing songs and the word beautiful is in it, talking about God. I struggle with language that is emotive. I just do.

It's something my counselor and I, we talk about, because I also recognize that it's a barrier when I'm interacting with my family. And so when I hear delight, and maybe you hear it this way, you're like, "Great. Put it on my tab. Here's another thing I'm going to stink at in my faith journey.

I got to read my Bible, I got to pray," Andy talked about meditating last week, and now I've got to delight. What does that even look like? I mean, is that like, mm, I'm delighting? It's like I was constipated.

What does that even look like to delight? And so there's such a disconnect for me. And so as a 45-year-old, I'm unpacking this in my own life, have not arrived in this delight thing. But what if I told you that delight is not something else to do, but it was something to receive?

Oh, receive what? Psalm 18. Flip over to Psalm 18 real quick. "He brought me out into a spacious place.

He rescued me because he delighted in me." The thing to receive is that God delights in you. So if I can ever get there, that the creator of the universe delights in me. If the creator of the universe delights in me, then the delighting in him simply just becomes a response. And I don't think we live, and again, I may be throwing you under the bus with me, so I don't live my faith out on a regular basis as if God delights in me.

Does he love me? Yeah. Hands down. Does he provide for me?

Yes. Is my salvation secure? 100%. Delight? Mm.

I want to read you this quote. You see, a lot of times we can get to the scriptures and we think that words like delight are just pretty language. But here's what's so cool. Everybody talks about how faith and science are at odds, and I think the more we know, the more evidence that it gives to God.

And this is what neurologists and psychologists are learning about this emotion, this feeling of delight. "Delight requires an attentiveness that affection does not. Delight communicates in subtle, crucial ways," and this is in reference to children, but it's for all of us, "in crucial ways, I see you, and having seen you, I enjoy you. It is in this seeing and enjoying with unconditional love and acceptance that delight holds its unique power." In other words, the child or an infant does nothing to desire for the parent to delight in them.

They continue. "When a child sees a look of delight, they instantly know, 'You want me here with you. I am indeed valuable to you.'" Look at this next line. "'Even though I am not adding much tangible value to this relationship, and may in fact, be causing a lot of trouble right now.' A child seeing and interpreting a look of delight instantly understands that he or she is safe." And here's the last little bit.

"Instead of being concerned or confused about his relationship with his parent, a child feeling a parent's delight can focus his attention in discovering what he is capable of and developing his gifts and skills without having to waste energy pleasing his parent or worrying if he's going to be rejected." Are you convinced that God delights in you like that? Do you see God seeing you like that? You probably, if you're a Christ follower, you're like, "Yeah, I know God loves me." Yes, but delight is different. When you hold a newborn, that child has done nothing to cause you to delight, but you delight.

Can I tell you where my faith usually operates when it comes to delight? It's not that God delights in me. It's that I show up, dragging my garbage, and God's like, "Here's the moron again." And he loves me, but he looks at me with disdain, like, "God, idiot." And I just wonder if I'm alone in that. I wonder if our relationship would look different if we understood that God doesn't see our big garbage can, and then on the other side of it, he's like, "Oh, there you are.

Yeah, glad you're here." But because of Jesus, the garbage can is removed and it stays removed, and so all he ever does is delight in us, finds pleasure in us. Well done. And when I operate from that place, I find it much easier- Yeah ... to delight in the Lord. And just so we cover all our bases, if you'll run back to the slide about transforming.

We'll give him just a minute. Back before that a little bit. One more. Keep going back.

Good thing I got it right here. Delight in me, and I will transform your heart to desire what you really want and need. That's how it impacts our desire and our wants. But I just wonder if, this morning, what you need to know is that God delights in you.

He doesn't expect you to bring value to the relationship. He understands that you're probably going to make things more difficult, but it's a place where you're safe, and you have no fear of rejection. So, this morning, I want to give us a chance to delight, or rather, to receive delight. This is what I want you to do.

Can everybody, all of our campuses, close your eyes? And I want you to ponder these statements. Number one, God sees you. Everything about you.

When nobody else does, when you're at work or when you're at home with your family and you feel invisible, God sees you. Not only does God see you, God knows you. He knows everything about you. He knows the things your spouse doesn't know.

He knows the things your best friend doesn't know. He knows the things you're struggling with that you haven't shared with anyone. He knows everything about you, and in spite or in the midst of all of that knowing and all of that seeing, God loves you. And here's the last one.

God delights in you. Not because you get it right. He just delights in you as you are, where you are. You say, "Well, what if I'm not a Christ follower?" You're still a part of his creation, his prize creation.

He delights in you for that, but his desire is much more. As our teams on all of our campuses are coming in, you can stand and sing. You can sit and ponder, but I want you to leave here knowing that the creator of the universe, your Heavenly Father, delights in you before you ever do anything. He finds pleasure in who you are.

Let's pray. Father God, I pray that, that that reality and that truth rest heavy on our hearts, convincingly on our hearts. God, thank you for delighting in us. And we pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen. You guys can go ahead and stand up.