Pastor Gail – Reading the Word and Prayer
1. Amen, amen, amen, we welcome You Lord. You may be seated. And if you, there is a Bible on the back of your seat if you’d like to read along with us. We like to, we really like to encourage people to read from the paper Bible. We get the bigger picture.
2. Psalm 104:1-5, “Praise the Lord, O my soul, O Lord my God, you are very great. You are clothed with splendor and majesty. He wraps himself in light as with a garment. He stretches out the heavens like a tent. And lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters. He makes the clouds his chariot and rides on the wings of the wind. He makes winds his messengers, flames of fire his servants. He set the earth on its foundations. It can never be moved.”
3. We are flames of fire as his servants when we are filled with his presence. Amen. There’s nothing or no one that is amazing to praise like the Lord. Before we sing this next song, I just want to explain it to you just a bit. Sometimes we sing songs and they sound good and we like the rhythm of the melody. But we don’t always know what we’re singing about. We just say, what’s that about? It’s the way you can put it up.
4. So, the next song begins, let the King of my heart be the mountain where I run. Let the King be a mountain? So that’s why I thought this morning it would be good to just explain a little bit what this song is saying. And it will open your heart, I think, to a greater depth of worship.
5. It’s declaring Jesus You are King. Come and rule my heart. No matter what is happening in the world, You are my mountain, my place where I can run and be safe. Amen. You are my shadow where I hide. You protect me. You save me, Lord. And whatever happens in life, He is keeping us safe through the storms of life. Amen.
6. There’s another part that says You’re the fire in my veins. And no one brings passion for life. No one brings life or energy like Jesus Christ. Amen. And the Spirit of the Holy Spirit when He comes and we just invite Him to be the witness of Jesus Christ in our lives. Amen. So, feel free right now to just join me and let’s pray. Let’s praise Him that He created everything and He did it for our pleasure to bless Him no matter what life brings.
7. Father God, we lift up our voices to You today. We praise You, O Lord. O Lord, I thank You that, Lord, You desire to be the King of my heart. That, Lord, You are my safe place no matter whatever happens, Lord, today. For anyone that hears this today, Lord, we declare we know that is what You desire to be. Lord, you are our safe place in every storm, God. You are the one who gives us passion to live when everything else seems to be failing because, God, You are the truth and the way and the life. Lord, there is no one like You. Absolutely no one. You are the Lord God of the impossible. Even as we lift up Your name today, we thank You for the privilege of being able to be here and worship You together and declare how amazing You are. Oh, how great You are, God. How great you are, God. Oh, hallelujah. Hallelujah. We worship You, Lord. We worship You, Lord, In the name of Jesus. Would you stand?

Pastor Gail – Greet one another
8. Oh, Lord, we all honor You. Jesus, say those songs to me. There is no one like You, Lord. No one like You, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Hallelujah. There is no one like God. Lord, Lord, Lord, we give You our time. Lord, we give You our lives. Hallelujah.
9. What a great God. Amen. Well, some of you are seated in front of me. I invite you to stand up for a moment. Then I’m going to invite you to greet someone with the love of the Lord. Well, it’s a wonderful morning to praise the Lord. Amen. And it’s an extra blessing to be able to be with the family of God and praise the Lord. And to gather in the presence of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. To just give Him praise. Amen. Amen. I mean, there really is no one like the Lord. Praise God.
Pastor Gail – Tithes and Announcements
10. So, we’re so happy. Some of you we haven’t seen in a while. We’re so glad, but I haven’t been here in a while. And we have April and Thothoris with us. April, back from the Philippines for a while. We’re so glad. Next week we might hear from you. Yay, April! Mina we’re so glad to see you here. And Fernando, you’re not on the boat. Okay, that’s good. We miss him when he’s gone. Amen. All of you look so good.
11. Today is the last Sunday of Ray and Kitty with us. They’re leaving back for America tomorrow morning. If you all would just raise your hands like this. Father, we pray a blessing right now. A blessing of thanks for knowing them. For their hearts to serve Greece. To see Your name exalted, Lord, here. So, we pray for them on their journey and as they go home, that You will use them all for Your glory. For the rest of their lives. In the name of Jesus. Amen. Praise God.
12. So, I know there’s a team of young women that are here serving. Just wave ladies. I don’t know. They’re here serving. They’re actually serving. They’re with the refugees. Yeah, they’re serving with the refugees. We’re so glad. Welcome. We’re glad you’re here. And so many of you. Amen. You look good. Tell somebody you look good. We’re glad you’re here. You look good.
13. Well, praise God, I want to make just a few announcements and we’ll get ready for our tithe and offering. First of all, I don’t want us to forget our trip to Corinth. I believe, Leto, can you lift up the thing that is receiving offerings for Corinth. When we receive the offering or at the end of service, even Evy lift it up real high. See that purple bag. Put all your change, or you could put even cash.
14. Sunday, July 12th, as a church family. We will travel to ancient Corinth. We will have Holy Communion in ancient Corinth. We’ll have lunch there together. It’s going to be amazing.
15. And so that this offering in the purple jar is going to help those that maybe struggle to come because we want all of us to come together.
16. Please don’t forget that Tuesday through Friday morning, actually, but Tuesday, to Thursday, especially. The church is open from 10 a.m. for prayer.
17. Pastor Brian and I, you may notice a week and a half ago, we were in Peru. We were with about 15,000 believers from around the world. And it was amazing. Every one of these groups had the same word. God is desiring us to pray, to pray, to pray. It’ll work better than any program. And when we pray, He will give us His program. Amen. Even if we can only drop in for five minutes on your way to a meeting or come in, the church is open for prayer.
18. And, of course, Wednesday evening at 7 p.m. We have a prayer time in sharing the word. It’s very wonderful. So, we’re really glad you’re here today, too.
19. I invite our ushers to come forward for just a moment. You know, we can never give back to God how much He’s given to us. Just come up front. And He’s done so much for us. But the thing that made this be about our God, if we put Him first in everything. And that even means our financial strength.
20. You know what God says? He will open the windows of heaven. And He will pour out a blessing on us that we can’t even contain. So, let’s make God first in every area of our lives. Amen. So, I’m going to ask Stavros if he will pray for our offering. Amen. So, we give to the Lord today. And don’t forget the trip to Corinth.
21. Just out of curiosity, I know that Eric went down to go to the march for Jesus. I wasn’t able to. Did anybody else possibly go to the march for Jesus? That’s okay. I just wanted to know if anybody was able to make it. But I know there’s so much going on. It’s amazing. And so, we have a lot of choices we can make for the Lord. We’re thankful for Korina. I don’t see her, but I think she’s here somewhere.
22. Korina that is with us. And she will be directing children’s ministries today if we have some children. So, we’re thankful for our children. And I do think that needs to be a prayer request for our church. Lord, send us families. Amen. Send us mighty men. Send us women that love God. Send the children that while they’re little, the message, the love of Jesus can be planted in their hearts.
23. And by the way, if you run out of something to pray about. Because surprisingly, there are people that tell me after about five minutes, I don’t know what to pray about. I don’t know. Come see me and I’ll give you a list. There are always wonderful things to pray about. And you know what is extra wonderful about it? When we pray with faith, we actually get to see God answered. We get to know he answers. Amen. And he wants to answer. He wants to answer. But he wants you to tell him. So, turn to somebody and tell them. God wants to answer your prayers. God wants to answer your prayers. Amen. Praise God. Praise the Lord. Amen.
24. So, we’re so thankful you’re here today. Maybe one of the days ahead, we’ll share a little bit about Peru. It was absolutely astounding with all of the Holy Spirit-filled empowered people from all around the world.
25. And it’s exciting about the hour we live in. And I want to especially say for people in our church that are like 35 and under. I’ll have to show you videos. It was astounding, amazing. And people, the reports from all over the world, is God is bringing a greater revival than we’ve ever seen among young people.
26. Yes. Yes. Amen. And let him begin in Glyfada. Amen. Amen. Hallelujah. I’m with you. I’ll pretend like I’m 15 or 18 or 20. All right. God bless.
27. Pastor Brian, will you come and preach this morning? Praise God.

Pastor Brian – Main Message
1. Good morning, everybody. It is good to be back home. I am not going to lie; I am not rested up yet. My body did not want to get out of my bed this morning. And it has to go away again on Wednesday, so you need to pray for me. I will come back Saturday, be here Sunday, and we will do it all over again.
2. As Pastor Gail mentioned about Peru, just a couple of things I will say. The place where we held the conference, it is a church that bought and converted an old bullfighting ring. They turned a place of violence into a place of great love. But it created some very unusual circumstances for having to work at a conference.
3. But while we had all of those people there, and it was fantastic. We were even greater blessed to know that over 500 million hits watched the services on social media. God is working in the earth. We were there with about 1,000 evangelists from around the world.
4. A part of this network that we are a part of has about 6,000 evangelists that are attached to it. Some of them are major, major people that everybody knows about, and they do huge crusades around the world. Some of them are humble men and women who pull a monitor with them into the jungles of Africa and preach the Gospel.
5. But over the last 18 months, more than 2,000 of them joined together to create crusades in the country of Thailand. They bought trucks and converted them into mobile stages. They taught a whole bunch of the local people in Thailand how to use these things and to keep them, and I felt like I wanted to share this because it’s huge.
6. In 18 months, they had face-to-face Gospel encounters with over 28 million people in Thailand. More than 6 million of those came to faith and were put into discipleship groups. And over 280 million people were reached online in the same campaigns. That’s something we are a part of. Sometimes we can roll down here into church, and we can feel small, but we are a part of something massive. Millions upon millions of people are coming to faith.
7. Every time you release Pastor Gial or myself to go and you pray for us, you are putting seed into that. And I want us to feel a part of what God is doing. God’s people should say amen.
8. Today is going to be a little bit of a different topic. We’re working through our English alphabet. Sorry to all the Greek speakers and Farsi speakers and Turkish speakers and Sinhalese speakers and Swedish speakers, whoever you are. I don’t know why I feel like I have to apologize for using the English alphabet that I do. Maybe it’s important. I always get amused when people call the Glyfada Church, they’ll say, oh, the American Church.
9. Except when Korina’s here or we have visitors, there’s only two Americans in the church. Eric, nobody knows where you’re from. Exactly, he’s Hungarian. We’re everything but an American church, I think. But we’re still going to use the English, we’re going to use the American alphabet. I’m from South Dakota, speak American.
10. Well, we’re on the letter ‘I’. And we’re talking about having a Christian, a spiritual worldview. And so, as Pastor Gail and Billy put this schedule together, they chose in their infinite lack of wisdom to assign me, the subject of Israel. I heard the groan and I heard the cheer. So let me start by saying this. I will probably offend somebody this morning. On some side of some argument, I will offend somebody.
11. So, I will apologize from the beginning. You can come yell at me afterward and we’ll hug each other and go home. Because it’s hard to find a more divisive subject in the world today. Then our tiny neighbors to the south, that I will call today both Israel and Palestine. That in itself is divisive.
12. To some people, there is only Israel. And Palestine does not really exist, as a separate entity. To other people, they believe Palestine is legitimately there, and was in modern history invaded by Jews. Then there are people like me, who some people call lacking in real values, because I don’t choose either one of those as the pure truth.
13. So, I’m going to work my way through that this morning, and I hope we’ll get to a point we can all agree on. But what we are going to do and will always do in this church is remove the politics from it. Everybody look at me and agree. We live in the world, but we are not of the world. So, I love all of my Jewish friends, I love all of my Arab friends, I love all of my Palestinian friends, and I declare that none of them should go to hell. And I pray against and I renounce violence wherever it comes from. Because I serve the Prince of Peace. And so do you. So that will forever be our stand.
14. But from a Christian perspective, Israel does occupy a unique and central place in biblical revelation. It also occupies a central place in modern history. As New Testament believers, we generally affirm that God’s covenant relationship with Israel remains significant. And that Jewish people continue to play an important role in God’s redemptive purposes.
15. Now, not every Jew lives in Israel, and not everybody living in Israel is a part of that Jewish heritage. So today, I’m not going to be talking to you about a geopolitical place called Israel. I’m talking about a people that God raised up to work with through history for all time.
16. This conviction is rooted in places like Romans 11. You can go home and read that chapter, but it should convince you. Or this one that’s on the screen, Genesis 12:1-3, “The Lord had said to Abram, go from your country, your people, and your father’s household to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you. I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you, I will curse. And all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
17. God has not, and never will, reject Israel. But through them, he has extended his grace to all of us. The seed of Abraham became the person Jesus Christ. And the person Jesus Christ brought us all into his family. So that has already been fulfilled. All people have been blessed, through Abram or Abraham as he became.
18. Now, we can have variations on how we see the establishment of modern Israel. But for the most part, myself included, we would see that what has happened in history is evidence of God’s faithfulness to his people. And this tells us something about prophecy, and I want you to hear this.
19. We believe in prophecy in this church, but prophecy is not primarily intended to tell you something that will happen. Prophecy is given, so that when it comes to pass, you can turn around and say, look, God has been faithful. If I had one euro for every prophecy somebody had given me in life, I’d be a millionaire.
20. I’m going to put that word prophecy in air quotes. Words are easy to speak. But when God speaks, it always comes to pass. And in that, we are then able to look back and say, ‘oh, God has been faithful.’ Too many Christians are running around trying to create their future off of something that has been said. Not because the Holy Spirit has confirmed it in their heart, but because it sounded really nice in their ears.
21. And so, we run after the thing that sounds good. Interestingly, I can’t remember any time that somebody has come to me and said, you know, this person prophesied something really bad about me. And, oh, I can’t wait for that to happen.
22. I don’t believe in that kind of nonsense anyway, but… We pick and choose what we like to hear. But there are certain things that God declares. And when the day passes that we see it fulfilled, we can utilize that to strengthen our faith. And to understand, He is who He says He is. He does what He says He will do. God’s Word is yes and amen.
23. We can look at what has happened throughout history with Israel and know that God’s Word is yes and amen. It serves as a living testimony that God works through nations. He works through people, sometimes over long periods of time. Always accomplishing His purposes despite wars, exile, persecution, being dispersed all over the world. God remains faithful.
24. As a model of instruction from modern history, we learn some other lessons, and this might get a little touchy for some of us as well. I thought about this when I was studying this out. It’s important to us because of where we live. Israel illustrates the power of cultural and religious identity. Despite centuries of displacement around the world, the Jewish people, for the most part, preserved their faith and their traditions.
25. They even preserved a sense of nationhood when they had no nation. The Jewish people had no nationhood. Why do I say that that’s important for us? That resilience teaches us something. It’s an example of how deeply held beliefs can hold communities together. Even through adversity.
26. Now, we live in Greece, and there is a deeply held cultural and religious identity, that has maintained its existence through wars and occupations and exiles, through all those problems. And sometimes, this is going to get a little touchy, sometimes, evangelical believers look at those things and call them strongholds. But I feel like the Lord has been teaching me, to look at those things as preservations. Things that… What do I mean by that?
27. We can look at a land that, by our standards, by our count, has very small numbers of what we call believers. And we can look at the majority of people almost as adversaries. But I’m beginning to see, that God has given a people a nugget, a kernel of truth.
28. Pastor Gail and I talk about this every Easter. Go and sit in the church and listen to the liturgy. It’s Gospel. The problem is not the words. The problem is not the beliefs. The problem is, when has the heart been touched? And all it takes… and we talk about this a lot. I’ve begun begging people to make it a point of prayer. Pray that that touch of the Holy Spirit would sit on what somebody has already heard and cause it to transform their lives.
29. We’re not trying to grow our religion. We’re trying to populate heaven. And all of these people around us, they’re about that far away, from the living truth. We have to start seeing things differently. Everybody is still okay with me?
30. We see through Israel that there’s something important in the relationship between faith and historical events. We see that in our own space. Why is it so important for a Greek to be Orthodox and Orthodox to be Greek? Why is it so important for us to be Orthodox? 400, if not thousands, of years of occupation. Through which a culture and a language and a people were nurtured by that faith.
31. And this is where I think we really fall down as evangelicals. We are not doing well at creating a culture of faith of our own. Statistics tell us. I’ll just use my home country as an example. So, Ray and Kitty, I’m sorry. Eric, I’m sorry. Pastor Gail, I’m not sorry. Statistics in the US today tell us that over 60% of people identify themselves as Christians. Statistics also say that a very small percentage of those actually go to church.
32. And beyond that, it has now become commonplace that the average American Christian who does go to church does so once a month. So that means we’ve got a lot of expression about something that we know very little about. Why? Because it’s not our culture. Our culture is football games. Boating trips. Kids sports. Movies. Entertainment of almost any kind.
33. We spend so much money on entertainment. Any basketball fans? Come on, man. Raise your hand high. I know you are. So, I’ve been watching the NBA Finals in America right now, the professional league finals.
34. Tonight, two o’clock in the morning for us, they will play in New York City at Madison Square Garden. Do you know what the least expensive ticket for that game is? The bottom ticket at the top of the stadium, $6,500. If you want to sit 10 seats away from the court, $220,000. And the stadium will be full of people who could pay somewhere between $6,000 and $1,000,000 for one ticket to one sporting event. And churches are closing every day by the hundreds and the thousands. Because we can’t afford to stay open.
35. But you know what? Statistically, 60% of the people at that stadium tonight will call themselves Christians. Listen, I’m not here to judge them if they can spend that amount of money and they have it. God bless them. But I have to question, where are God’s people, who are living godly lives? What is our culture?
36. Israel’s story could never be understood apart from its religious foundations. I’m going to give you two more things. One is this. Israel offers us lessons of hope and restoration. This is bigger than just any group of people. God chose Abraham to father a nation who would teach us an example that would be given to all mankind.
37. That he is the Alpha and the Omega. He is the beginning and the end. Israel encourages us to consider our own biblical narratives. It’s not just one nation among many. It is an instruction for us to learn from, to learn that faith and identity and our own historical destiny, they’re all tied up together. And they point us as believers to a confidence in God.
38. His work is always going on in the world. In every place at all times, God is at work. Oh, but my space is so hard. No! God is faithful. He’s at work in your life. Oh, but you don’t feel my pain. No, I don’t. But God is faithful. And he’s at work in your life. But you don’t know how bad my family treats me. No, I don’t. Mine treats me pretty good. Because we live 6,000 miles apart. It’s not hard. Stop receiving that. God is at work.
39. One of my favorite sermons. I believe it’s 1st Chronicles 12. When all of Israel finally understood that David should be king. All of the leaders of the tribes, began to come to pledge themselves to David. And of all the tribes, all we have is numbers. There were 6,000 leaders and 12,000 soldiers and whatever. But of one people. One group of people.
40. The Bible calls them the sons or the men of Issachar. Says they came to David. And they had an unusual skill. Only people that received the description. It said they were men who knew the time. And they knew what Israel should do. They were seers. They saw what God was doing. They didn’t come just because everybody else was coming and it seemed like the tide had changed. They came. Because God put something in their heart. That they could understand. And it changed the situation.
41. And I am declaring today for each one of us. That we are the house of the Holy Spirit. And that means there is wisdom at work in us. That is not at work anywhere else. We are the sons of Issachar. If we have ears to hear. And eyes to see. And faith to know. God is at work. In you. And that is the letter ‘I’.
42. Thank you, Lord, for Your Word. Thank You, Holy Spirit, that you are here. And that You are not just with us, You are not just among us, but You are in us. And we receive Your work. In Jesus’ name.