Walk Series Week 1

Motion Church | Walk — Week 1: "Walk This Way"

One night. One wrestling match. One limp that changed everything.

Motion Church kicks off a brand-new series called Walk — a multi-week journey through stories from Scripture that ask a simple but searching question: how are you walking? Not just with your feet, but with your life. "A walk doesn't just describe what you're doing. It describes who you are. It's the direction of your heart, your life, the way that you carry yourself — all of it is encompassed in this idea of a walk."

Week 1 takes us all the way back to Genesis and one of the most fascinating encounters in all of Scripture. Jacob — son of Isaac, grandson of Abraham — was a man carrying the weight of a complicated past. On the eve of a terrifying reunion with his estranged brother Esau, alone in the dark, Jacob was suddenly wrestling with a stranger until daybreak. By morning, he had a new name and a permanent limp. And here's the point: "When God touched his hip, he walked differently. When he had an encounter with Jesus... he walked differently."

The message for us is just as straightforward. "If you have an encounter with Jesus, if you give Jesus full reign of your heart and your life, there's something about your life after you come face to face with the Son of God that should be different." 2 Corinthians 5:17 says it plainly: if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. The new has come.

So what does that different walk actually look like? It's not a rulebook. It's a set of principles — because your walk with God is going to look specific to you. But the first step is walking in different places. Different locations, different relationships, different habits on social media — anything pulling you away from the person God is calling you to be. "Jesus changed them. They didn't change him." That's a pretty big difference.

And it's not just about what you're walking away from. Proverbs reminds us that a fool rushes toward folly, but a wise person walks away from it. The goal is to punch in a destination and head toward something better. Philippians 4:8 sets that address: "Whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, worthy of praise — think about these things. Walk toward these things."

As the series kicks off, three questions close the message: What about your life is different since you encountered Jesus? What are you walking away from? And what are you walking toward? "Set that as the direction, the coordinates. Punch that address in the GPS of your heart. Let's walk towards that."