This is the word of the Lord.

Morning, friends.

Great to be with you.

My name's Dave, part of the team here.

I get to be the youth minister in particular, which is the best job in the world.

And a special welcome to you.

Has anyone come from the Geelong Running Festival? Like, you ran so quickly that you finished and you've already come to church? No one yet? No, they're still running? That's all right, good.

eight-year-old boy.

For more information, visit ridley.edu.au.

And I'm going to pray as we start.

Father in heaven, we pray that as we come to your word, you would give us faith like a child to hear it, to believe it and to live it.

I pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Well, there's the old saying, don't miss the forest for the trees.

And at one level, when you think about it, it's a pretty silly saying.

Thanks be to God.

Morning City on a Hill, great to be with you.

How are you? Good.

Good.

My name's Dave.

I am the youth minister here.

I reckon it's the best job in the world.

through them.

It's turning us into particular kinds of people in a particular kind of society.

And if I could follow on from that, an analogy I found really helpful that I discovered since our conversation at the training day is, uh, there was a machine, I think the 1700s called the mechanical Turk.

It's about the size of a school desk with a mannequin coming out the top and it has a chess board on top and you would play chess against this machine.

It turns out it was very good.

Very good.

And so it was kind of like this, uh, amazing spectacle that people would come from all over to see people play against this chess, chess machine before the edge of screens and computers.

Um, and they'd open up parts of it and you'd see all these mechanical gears whirring, and it was just this mechanical marvel, a huge piece of technology that people weren't ready for.

And what about you, Dave? Do you have any final thoughts or reflections, questions to pose?