- If I want you to walk away with anything,
I want you to realize Jesus can take your place
if you let Him.
When I was in high school, my senior year
I believe God got a hold of my heart
and I actually started this thing called The Gathering
where I preached once a month to my high school students
and it was awesome.
But because of that and because I hated football
at the time, I practiced all summer,
I was one of the team captains,
but I went up the coach and I said I quit.
I was like, I can't take it anymore.
I'm miserable.
I don't look forward to every single day,
I want, you know, I was 17 so I thought
I was so smart, right?
So right before, really, school started,
I told the coach I'm done.
But right before that, literally the day before,
we got to pick our numbers, I got my jersey,
I got my helmet, which they had to always give me
a lineman helmet because my head's too big
and then they had to put a receiver mask on it.
It was always so fun to be made fun of.
And so I got this number nine,
because it's what Joel Hanson willed to me
and then obviously, the next day I quit.
Well the first game of the season,
the first game was a big deal.
It was against our rivals I think
and they filmed the whole thing.
So if you guys know, especially on Friday nights
and Saturday mornings, they show the film,
the footage of the football games.
What was amazing, my phone, we did text back then,
my phone blew up.
I received call after call and I'm thinking,
what is going on here?
Thank you, God.
What happened is the next wide receiver
who was actually really good, he took my number.
He took number nine, that was his favorite number.
But what's so great is the newspaper didn't know that!
So I was on channel three TV.
Trey Van Camp, 400 yards!
And I was like, and I was sleeping.
It was just, I'm that good!
Like people would call me.
Friends I haven't talked to in years.
And they were like dude, you are so good.
I'm like I know, at what?
You know.
You got touchdowns!
Did you look at the footage from last year?
What's going on?
Check the news!
So I'm like hey Mom!
I'm incredible, watch!
And it was so cool.
And I never told anybody the truth (laughs).
So to this day, Charles Jones
who lives in the West Valley
thinks I ran those 400 yards and got five touchdowns.
And I promise you, he was 10 times faster than me, okay.
And so I got all this credit for that,
and I realized in that moment, oh my goodness,
I finally, at my young age, I have
a gospel illustration here.
Friends, you know what's so incredible?
It's at the moment you give up,
you throw in the towel and say
I'm not playing this game anymore.
I have tried, I am miserable, I am a failure, I'm too slow!
When you finally leave it all out and Jesus takes
your place, takes your name, and he lives inside of you,
you get credit for things you've never done before.
You are perfect and righteous and blameless
and a child of God, you were written in the Book of Life
and everybody knows about it even though you did nothing.
And that is what's so good about this good news.
Stop trying 'cause you're slow!
Jesus will do it in your place.
My plead with you is you are still showing up to practice
every day, absolutely miserable, going home,
eating twink--
This is getting way too personal, this was my life.
Eating all these things saying God I can't do it.
Exactly.
That's exactly where he wants you to be.
The next thing to do is not to achieve.
The next thing you must do is to believe and receive
and say Jesus, I need you to run this race
in my place.
Have you done that before?
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