Sermons tagged with Journey

Good morning. Welcome to Grace. It's a good thing we turned out all the lights so you couldn't see that transition up here. You had no clue I was on the stage until the lights came back on. Just believe that. It's fine. Hey, if you are new, if you're visiting, my name is Aaron. I get to serve as one of the pastors out here, and honestly, I'm so blessed to serve as one of the pastors out here. If you're watching at home, online, thank you for tuning in. So glad that you all decided to join us today. As Sarah said a little bit earlier, at the beginning of the summer, we jumped into a series called Moses. And essentially all we're doing is we're going through the book of Exodus and we're looking at the journey of Moses and the Israelites as God rescued them from slavery to the Egyptians and is leading them towards the promised land. And so we're just, we're taking some of the stories, honestly, most of it's a lot chapter by chapter, and we're seeing exactly what we can learn from this. And I'm very excited to be sharing with you today. Nate, thank you so much for allowing me to teach. He didn't take the day off. He is still here. You don't recognize him because you see more of his face than usual. I don't know if I like it, but it's there. I'm just kidding. You look lovely, man. Keep it going. But hey, so I want to jump in today. I want to start off with, honestly, just a little bit of vulnerability. I want to put myself out there against my better judgment, mostly because of you, if I'm being honest, Chris. But I'm going to be vulnerable, throw myself out there, okay? I'm not a big fan of spiders actually I don't like spiders at all I believe that in the creation God allowed Satan to create two things one was spiders the other was Walmart like both of those things just avoid with everything you can and actually like I used to be a lot worse than I am now I used to be terrified of spiders to the point that I could even kill him I you where it started. I was sub-10 years old and my parents thought it would be a good idea for me to watch Arachnophobia. So if you need some good parenting advice, just let your kids watch a horror movie and just see how it scars them for the rest of their life. And then it got to the point where I couldn't even kill them because I remember I was at work one time and there was a big fat spider crawling across the ground so I stepped on it. I didn't realize that it was a pregnant spider. And so, yeah, yeah, you've experienced it before. They don't just die. Thousands of little spiders are like, this ain't for me. I don't like it. I don't like it. So Tamara then became the resident spider killer in our home. I can remember. Don't judge me. It's justified, but I can remember one time driving down the road. We were in Georgia at this point in time. We had somewhere to go. I don't quite remember what we had to do or what we were headed to, but I know a spider crawled across the dashboard. And what popped in my head was one of two things are going to happen. I'm going to wreck and kill us both, or the spider is going to crawl across the vent. It's going to blow in my face and eat me alive. So both of those things are very realistic. Both of them could have happened. So I knew it had to die, so I did the thing you have to do. I pulled over on the side of the road, got out of the car, and I said, Tamara, I'm not getting back in the car until you kill the spider. She's like, no, we're going to be late. You've got to get in the car. I hear what you're saying. I just don't see me doing that. I need you to kill the spider. And then she's like, fine, okay. So we had to wait for it to reemerge from the blower that's going to blow in my face and all that stuff. So she grabbed a paper towel, killed the spider. She's like, okay, fine, it's dead. Let's go. I was like, well, I hear you. But I kind of need evidence. I need you to show me the spider is dead. Because you may not have squished it hard enough. Maybe it's still running around. We need to see evidence. Then I need you to dangle it out the window so it's no longer in the car. Just in case it decides to resurrect and come to attack us then because you made it mad for trying to kill it. Because if that doesn't happen, we're staying where we are. We're not going to go anywhere else. Like you can drive. Just come back and pick me up after you kill the spider. Right? Like I think we've all had those moments before where we face something that's deeply uncomfortable. And it's like, yeah, I don't see me doing that. This isn't for me. Right? But if you've been following Jesus for very long, isn't it true? And wouldn't you say that you have those encounters a little bit more often? Like we all have next steps. One of our traits, you can read it on the lobby in the back, is that we are step takers. Every person in here has a next step in front of them. God has moving you to something. God is asking you to do something, whether it's something he wants to do in you or something he wants to do through you. And doesn't it seem like we often come to this place where God asks us to do something, and it's like, well, God, I hear you. I don't see me doing that. I don't see me taking the step that you're asking me to take. Like there's just too much uncertainty on the other side of that. I don't quite know how this is all going to play out. I need a little bit of evidence. The problem that we kind of run into when it comes to these being step takers is that we oftentimes confuse or we oftentimes mistake comfort for confirmation. I'm not talking about comfort like the AC seats, right? Like those should should be. Instead of EV vehicles like where your car shuts off automatically at the red light. That needs to be. The AC ventilated seats needs to be the thing that they mandate for all cars from this point forward. Because they're lovely. That's comfortable. But that's not the comfort I'm talking about. The comfort that I'm talking about is comfort in your security. Hey, God. I want to take this step, but you've got to give me a little bit more evidence that I'm going to be okay when I do. Hey, God, I hear you that you want me to go in this direction. You want me to do this thing, but honestly, I'm just not sure that's for me. I don't think I have the skill set for that. You've got the wrong guy. You've got the wrong person. You're barking up the wrong tree, God. listen, I want to go and I want to do the thing that you're asking me to do, but the thing that you're asking me to do, I just don't see it happen because I'm uncomfortable with this. God, I want to know it's you asking me to move in this direction, but I just, we chase this feeling of comfort and we let that be our confirmation that we need to step in a particular direction, that we need to do the thing that God is asking us to do, or even if it is God asking us to do it. We oftentimes let comfort be our confirmation, and the scary thing about chasing comfort is not necessarily what it leads you to. Although we've all probably experienced moments of pursuing comfort that have led us to doing things that haven't been good for our life. But the scary part about this is what it keeps you from. Like, do you know, listen for a second. Like, do you know you were created with a purpose, regardless where you are in your faith journey, regardless if you believe or not believe. I understand that. But you were created, you were specifically wired, because God wants to do something through you that would blow your mind. Like, I love how Paul says it in Ephesians. He says, hey, God is working in you to do something through you to impact the world around you that would absolutely stun you. You have no clue what's on the other side of that step. You have no clue what's on the other side of stepping in and leaning into that discomfort to experience God in ways you haven't experienced him before. And here's what's sad about it. Like, I've experienced this, right? What's sad and scary about these moments is you want to take the step. Like, I don't know what it is for you. Maybe it's initiating reconciliation with a relationship, a spouse or a friend or a child or a relative or something like that. Maybe it's taking a step in your job, maybe to leave a job, maybe to start a new job. Maybe it's to do something in ministry. Maybe it's to get involved with one of our mission teams. Maybe it's to go to Mexico, whatever it may be for you, I have no clue. But on the other side of that decision is this, God, I need a little bit more evidence that things are going to work out the way that I'm hoping they're going to work out. So how do you do it? How do you step in? How do you lean in to the discomfort? How do we keep that from preventing us from fulfilling and walking into the person and the life that God has created us to live? That's what we're going to talk about today. If you have your Bibles, you can turn to Exodus 17. That's where we're going to be camped out. I'm going to jump over to James at one point, but we'll come right back to Exodus. If you don't have your Bibles, we're going to put it on this fancy digital Bible in the sky, but let's jump in. The Israelites, like I said, we started from where Moses was confirmed as leader. God kind of called him, and he goes, and they rescued the Israelites. We are less than six weeks away from the Red Sea, where the Egyptian army was chasing them. They got pinned up against the Red Sea. The Red Sea split. They walked through. And it's even less time than that from what Nate talked about last week with the manna and the quail. Well, God just made bread appear from nowhere to excess. So they take the next step in the journey. And this is where we are in 17.1. The whole Israelite community set out from the desert of sin. Just a quick aside. That's not sin. Oftentimes when we read scripture like this, we try to make it say something that it doesn't say. It's not talking about, hey, oh, look, they're leaving sin. That's not it. It's a place, the desert of sin. And it says, traveling from place to place, as the Lord commanded, they camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. So they quarreled with Moses and said, give us water to drink. Moses replied, why do you quarrel with me? Why do you put the Lord to the test? But the people were thirsty for water there, and they grumbled against Moses. They said, why did you bring us up out of Egypt to make us and our children and our livestock die of thirst? Then Moses cried out to the Lord. I love this. I love this prayer. Moses cried out to the Lord. What am I to do with these people? Look at these people you gave me. What am I supposed to do with them? He said that Moses cried to the Lord. What am I supposed to do with these people? By the way, when our staff gathers, like this is our prayer oftentimes. What are we supposed to do with their heathens? Again, talking about you, Chris. But what are we supposed to do with these people? They are almost ready to stone me. I don't know what the Hebrew word is for, hey, Moses, you about to catch these hands? But I'm sure he heard it quite a bit in that manner. Like they were fed up. Like they were done. And what's incredible about this, the journey that they had experienced and they reached their breaking point. Like the word quarreled. Some of your versions, depending on what you read, it may say complain. But this is another level. Like they had reached another level of discomfort. They had stepped into a situation like, you know, we can't do this anymore. The word, this is the first time that it's been used because they were checked out. They had experienced a fatigue and a failure of their faith just because they were tired. And Moses even responded in a different way. Like when they came to him, Moses was now fearing for his life. He's like, no, no, no, this is out of hand, God. I understand you're leading us somewhere. I understand you're taking us on a journey, but I don't think you understand the gravity of the situation right now, Lord. These people are about to kill me. Everyone was checked. They had gotten to this place. If you had been here for many of the sermons throughout this series, you'd begin to notice this pattern emerge. They take a step, they're obedient, they encounter a challenge. They take a step, they're obedient, they encounter an impossible situation. They take a step, they're obedient, they're going where God is asking them to go. And now, there's no hope. The word test that is used. It was interesting to me because you see places throughout Scripture where it says, hey, test the Lord, right? Like we're invited to test God's will, to see, hey, is this really, you see Gideon do that? Gideon tells him, hey, I want you to go to the heroes. Okay, make the fleece wet. Like he's just asking, God, I want to make sure this is you telling me, but that's not what's happening right now with the Israelites. The Israelites aren't testing God's will. They're questioning his character. They believe one of two things to be true. They say, God, you brought us here and you abandoned us. And or you brought us here to kill us, you and Moses. And they were done. I've done everything you've asked me to do. I've taken the steps you've asked me to take. I've done the ridiculous things that you've asked me to do. And yeah, we've had some great experiences, God. But look, I did it and now I'm here. This is what happens when what you experience doesn't match what you expect. And now it's very easy for us to look at this and kind of throw rocks at them, right? Like, man, you guys, how could you possibly question? Like, you were just fed. You had more manna than you could possibly ask for. Like, you saw the seas split and then swallow the Egyptian army. Like, you saw the Nile turn to blood. You saw all of the places. Like, how could you possibly doubt that God is here with you, that God is working with you, that God is willing to take care of you. They had reached their breaking point, and they began to crave the comforts of familiarity. And this isn't just a Christian thing. Like psychologists and mental health professionals tell us that the majority of people choose to stay in the familiar versus venturing into the unknown. Even if the familiar is unhealthy, even if the familiar is a place they know they don't need to be, even if what's on the other side of the step is something that they crave, they choose to stay in what they know because of the uncertainty, because of the risk of what could be. And this is what was going on with the Israelites. They began to crave. Like, listen, listen, I know life with Pharaoh was hard. I know we were slaves. I know that things weren't good. But you know what? We didn't have to wonder when we were going to eat or what we were going to eat. We didn't have to worry what we were going to drink. We didn't have to worry where we were going to sleep. Like, I missed the comfort of just knowing. So God, like all of their confirmation that God was with them, that God is faithful, that God is good, completely went out the window because their comfort was rattled. Some of you know some of my story. I grew up in the church. My father was a pastor, and I remember one season in particular. It just got really bad. I remember going to church one Sunday morning, and when my father got up to start preaching, every single thing that he would say, from the hello, so glad you guys are here, you heard this echo from the crowd, and there was a guy who began just mocking him. Every single thing that he said, he would begin mocking. My dad knew something was about to go off. Not yet. It's a little bit early. Sorry. That's on me. But hey, way to pay attention. But he began mocking. I was going to let you come. I just didn't want you to stand up there for 30 minutes. Sorry. All right, let's start over. I've got to go back to the beginning. Hey, guys, welcome to Grace. I'm so glad that you're here. No, I'm kidding. But I remember when that started to happen. My dad knew something was about to go on. And so he asked me to stand up, and we just lived right down the road. He said, hey, son, I want you to go home. I was maybe 12, 13 years old. And I was like, yeah, I'm going to church today. This is great. But he sent me home, and what I found out later on is that the guy and his family were upset with my father because he was going to allow someone to become a member of the church who had been divorced and remarried. They didn't think that was okay. And so him and his family were pretty prominent in that church, and on that day when my dad asked me to leave, they ended up gathering around him like a schoolyard bully threatening to fight him. And what my family did in that point, maybe within a month, two months, I didn't sign up for this. God, this isn't what you told me I should expect. I don't want to do this anymore. Have you ever been there? The church has done a pretty horrible job, if we can be honest, about talking about the grittiness and the challenge and difficulty of faith. And because of that, the expectation of ease has crept its way into Christianity. God, it's not supposed to be this hard. God, I understand that you're good. I understand that you're faithful, but this? I didn't sign up for this. I don't want anything to do with it. There's a book called The Nuns. It's not talking about the little Catholic black hat ladies. It's talking about a group of people who sociologists and researchers studied for a little bit. On the census, it's the people who mark non-affiliated when it comes to like the religion portion. Hey, are you affiliated with the? No, no affiliation. So they're calling them the nuns. And what they found is there's this age range between about 30 to 50 to 55 years old who are marking not affiliated, want nothing to do with church, have no desire to go. It's just not a part of their life. But that wasn't always the case. They actually grew up, a large portion of the people grew up in the church. And they were painted this picture of what it means to follow Jesus. That when they began living their life, when they stepped into the real world, when they started experiencing the challenges, it wasn't what they were told. And they were told when they were a kid, hey, listen, just give your life to Jesus. Everything's going to be great. You'll get the promotion. You'll have money issues. Your spouse is going to be great. Your kids are going to stop throwing shoes at each other on the way to church. All you got to do is just follow Jesus and everything changes. You'll have the house, you'll have the yard, all the dreams that you want. It's right there for you. But when they experience something different, say, God, this isn't what I expected. I'm a little uncomfortable being here and I just don't, I don't think this is for me. Because clearly I'm either believing wrong or it's just not real. Like I'm not sure about this whole faith thing anymore. The only problem with that, man, you don't see that anywhere in the Bible. Anywhere throughout scripture, you don't see this promise of perfection or this promise of a great, easy life. You actually see the opposite. You see Jesus tell his disciples, hey, listen, the things that you're seeing me do, man, the things you're seeing me experience, it's going to be harder for you. You see John the Baptist, who was the, he ushered in Jesus, like he was the one who was the first one. This, this is the guy, this is the guy that the Old Testament promised, who's going to fix all the stuff, this is the guy, and he ends up in jail, he's like, well, this isn't what I expected, and he asked some of his disciples to go and just check, hey, make sure he's really the guy, because this is supposed to be different, like I'm not supposed to be dealing with the thing that I'm dealing with right now. Is he really the guy? Like, have you ever been there? I love what James teaches us. Jesus' brother writes a letter to the Israelites. And in James 1, it says this. It says, consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds. What? James, I don't think you know how trials work, my man. Like that experience of joy, no, no, no, no, no. Because in your trial, when your faith is tested, it produces perseverance. There's purpose in that difficulty. There's purpose. And don't lean away. Don't let the discomfort, don't let the uncertainty push you away from what's on the other side of leaning in to the uncomfortable step, of leaning in to the place that God asks you to go. Because when you do that, when perseverance finishes its work, it does so that your faith may be mature and your faith may be complete. James says, listen, you're going to face moments that you didn't expect. You don't have to let discomfort push you away from what's on the other side because those moments are necessary in your faith journey. What James is teaching us in this moment is that it's impossible. It's not possible to grow your faith beyond your certainty. That's the next slide. I'll move through those verses, Laura. You can jump ahead. It's not possible to grow your faith beyond your certainty. When you shape your life and surround your day-to-day, when you're living in a moment where you don't have any questions, where you don't have any worries, where you don't have any doubts, where you don't have any fears, where you have no reason to call on God and lean and depend on God and who he is and his provision, no faith is necessary. We have to exercise our faith in order to see it grow. And what James is saying, don't run from these moments. Don't run from these places. Because if you lean in, like the step that God has asked you, if you just lean into that, just take the step, what you will see is you will see God show up. You will see God be faithful. You will see God in ways you never expected and you have never experienced before. And the result of that is a greater dependency, is a stronger faith, is a deeper faith, is a more unshakable faith. And James says, just, you can, you can just lean in, like lean into those moments. Now it's really important that you hear this. So, how does Nate do it whenever he says, is it do like this, and then I think he goes down like this? Like, it's really important that you hear this, right? I love you, man. But no, it's very important that you hear this. Because it's easy to confuse. Every bad thing that's happening in your life isn't a result of God leading you to that place. It's important to remember that we live in a broken world where sin exists, evil is present, and sometimes the pain, the challenge, the discomfort that you're feeling is a result of someone else's sin against you. But the beautiful part about what James is saying, the context in which James is writing this letter, he's writing it to Israelites who are being persecuted for their faith. They're being persecuted. Someone else is evil. What James is telling us in this moment is God's goodness and God's plans aren't only possible when he orchestrates it. God doesn't have to lead you to the place of discomfort for him to do something incredible. God is able to work and move and do in all things, in all situations. He's not limited to his own plans. And James says, so regardless what it is, regardless what season you're facing, you can lean in. And for our context, what we're talking about today, the step that's ahead of you, James says you can lean in. Because what's on the other side of that? It may take a while. But what's on the other side of that is a deeper dependency. And you have never been so secure in the steps that you're going to take than when you have a deep dependency on who God is and his provision for you. If faith is a gift from God, seizes of doubt and uncertainty are the box in which they're wrapped in. You don't have to run away from it. But how do you do it? I think God understands the human struggle. Like I said, you don't see throughout the Bible anywhere where it says, hey, listen, get it together. It's easier than this. Just believe. Which is why I think God didn't respond to the Israelites in this moment with rebuke. He didn't slap them across the head. He actually, Moses, he says, what am I supposed to do with these people? In 17, verse 7, it says this. I'm sorry, verse 5. So Moses did this in the sight of the elders of Israel. And he called the place Massa and Meribah. Because the Israelites quarreled and because they tested the Lord, saying, is the Lord among us or not? I do think it's interesting that the remedy that God offered to Moses to move forward was another ridiculous task. Hey, grab the staff and go hit that rock and water's going to come out of it. God, that's not what rocks do. I don't think you understand that, but he did it. He took these steps, he struck the rock, and God provided for their needs. Just like us on this side of the story looking in, like, yeah, yeah, we knew that was going to happen. We know how the story goes. But it just serves as a reminder for us that, like, God's not calling you to a place where he's going to watch you fail. There's not a timeline on that. Like, the step he's asking you to take, like, it's as good as what you believe it could be, why he's leading you to that place. But I love that it's just not, like I said, you don't see throughout the scripture. I'm not convinced that, I'm not convinced that God asks us to have blind faith. Like I don't see Jesus just getting so mad because the disciples that are following him just don't believe. What I see him rebuke and correct is, hey, do you still not believe? Like, do you still not trust that I am right here with you after all that you've seen? And I think that's why God instructed Moses to grab the staff. The staff has made a lot of appearances throughout the journey so far, throughout the book of Exodus. And actually, it's going to be here for the remainder of the Old Testament, because it was put in the Ark of the Covenant, along with a couple of other things, with the manna from last week's message, and then the stone tablets, which are coming up in a couple weeks from the Ten Commandments. But also you had the staff that was in there. The staff represented more than just a wooden stick. It represented more than just stability. It was a representation of God's faithfulness in the past. The staff was what God used to convince Moses the direction he needed to go, that he was the one that he was going to be leading. The staff is what God used to convince Pharaoh that God was legit. And you better listen, man. Let his people go, right? The staff is what God used to turn the blood, the Nile River into blood. The staff is what God used to show, hey, listen, watch my faithfulness. The Red Sea splits and you find your escape. The staff is what God used throughout so much of their story. The staff represented. Do you remember? Do you remember what I did? Do you remember that previous step that you stepped into that you were uncertain about? And do you remember my faithfulness? So after my family and I walked away from the church, I had no thought of God. It wasn't a consideration at all. And I don't know any other way to say that. I just lived my life. There was never anything that made me think, I need to do something different here. Until I was about 19 years old, I had a car accident that should have killed me. And it was a miraculous moment that I didn't. But God reintroduced himself to my life. And I remember in my faith journey, I got to this point. I was like, okay, God, listen, I just want to serve you. I just want to do something. I want to go to the place that you're asking me to go. I hope it's music. I was a mediocre at best musician. Maybe still am. Don't laugh at that. But I was a mediocre at best musician. I hope it's music, God. But I'll legitimately do whatever you want me to do. I'll legitimately, I'll clean the toilet. I just want to serve you, Lord. And I remember I called some friends and I had them pray for me. Hey, listen, I'm searching for what God wants me to do, and I just need to know what direction to go. I need to know what step to take in my life. And I remember at this point in time, I was a night owner at a hotel. I was an assistant basketball coach for a high school, and I was going to school full time. I legitimately got maybe four hours of sleep a day during basketball season. It was even less than that with practices and all that. And the four hours, four to five hours, it was just so intermittent. But I remember after talking to a friend in Florida, man, there was like a two-week stretch where I legitimately could sleep no more than about an hour a day. Because have you ever had something on your mind so much that it keeps you awake? Like that's a real thing. And there was something, every time I laid my head down to go to sleep, there was a musical riff, there was a guitar, a chord progression. There was, that I had, it was just so eating away at me that I had to get up and go play the guitar. There was some lyrics that I was writing down or something was just something with music. It was so heavy on my mind that it legitimately kept me awake at night. And I remember getting out of the shower one day to get ready to go to the hotel for work, and I saw my phone had a missed call, and it was a voicemail. It was actually the guy that prayed with me in Florida. And I remember the moment, I had no clue what his voicemail said, but I remember the moment that I heard his voice. I remembered one of the lines from the prayer two weeks ago. And he said, hey God, put it on Aaron's mind. So much. What do you want him to do if he loses sleep at night? And I, man, oh, this is it. Like, this is evidence. Like, now I know where to go. I know what to do. I know God is with me. I know God has called me. I know God has chosen me to be a part of something. Like, I'm just so excited. And so I started that journey. And in the journey of being a pastor, in the journey of leading worship, I can't tell you how many times insecurity sets in. It says, you're not the guy. You're not the one. You're not good enough for this. Who are you that people are going to follow you or listen to you? And I'm not saying this because I need accolades or I need you to give me kudos. That's not the point. But what I have in my life, the gift by the grace of God, has given me a staff that I can cling to when my faith begins to slip. So, let me ask you a question. What's the step God keeps putting in front of you? What's the thing he's asking you to do for your marriage, for your family, for your ministry, for your life? What is the step that has caused you to pump the brakes? Because it's a little uncertain. Second question. What's your staff? And don't answer that too quickly. Spend some time thinking, where have you experienced the greatness and goodness of God in a way that it cannot be taken away from you? Where have you experienced the greatness and goodness of God that you can cling to it and let it be a motivator? No, no, no, no, no. I can lean in. I can go and I can do the things that God is asking me to do, not because of me, because I serve a faithful God. He will not leave me. Just step. Take your staff and go. Let's say a prayer. God, thank you so much. God, I thank you for man, I'm just struck by by your grace and your willingness and your desire to use us in ways that we could never imagine. God, I'm so grateful that for each and every person in here, regardless where they are in their faith journey, or if they're not stepping into faith, or they don't really know if they believe, God, I thank you that you thought of them, and you have a plan for them. And I just ask, God, that you would, just by the graciousness and the gentleness of your Holy Spirit, you would come alongside of us, God, and you would remind us that you would do for us what you did for Moses in this moment when he was terrified, when he had no clue what to do, when he thought he was about to die. You reminded him, hey, you remember the thing? You're not asking us to believe blindly, but you're asking us to cling to the faithfulness we've experienced, God, and we can all, all go back to the cross. In the text that Paul tells us, that if God is for us, who can be against us? And the evidence of this is the cross of Christ, that you, God, wouldn't even spare your own son for our lives. Thank you for that, God. We ask for clarity. We ask for wisdom. We ask for hope. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thank you so much for joining us. If you're watching online, thank you for doing so. If you're catching up later, that's fantastic. Thank you for doing that. If I seem just a little bit distracted this morning in the transport of my paper, it got a crease in it. And when I was a teacher, if you handed in a piece of paper to me that had a crease in it, I handed it back to you and made you rewrite it because it doesn't stack well and I don't like it. So now every time I look at it, I'm like, this sucks. So, you know, forgive me that. This morning we are in some part of our series in the life of Moses, and we've arrived at a very famous story where Moses parts the Red Sea. And this is a story that's so famous that even if you're not a church person, you have become at some point aware of it. And as I was prepping for this sermon, I was reminded, when I was a kid, I really enjoyed Farside. And there's this one Farside cartoon. Thank you, Tom, for your support. Everyone else, you're mean. And you have no sense of humor because Farside is great. And I remember this particular cartoon of Moses as a kid. And I know it says Moses as a kid at the bottom. I know you can't see that very well, but that's him parting his glass of milk at breakfast just for practice, right? So we know this story. We know what it is. We've heard it before. I think the question for us in 2025 in the United States is, does this story about how God rescued his children in ancient Egypt apply to us today? And are there things that we can pull from it that we can apply to our lives? Or is it just a story about what God did? And we should marvel at that. And honestly, sometimes that should be the answer. We should just read a story and think about it and consume it and allow ourselves to just marvel at who our God is in that story. But as I looked at it, I did think, because I put this in the series plan because you can't tell the story of Moses and not tell the story of the parting of the Red Sea. So I knew that we needed to do it. But it's very rare that when I put a sermon on the calendar or in the series that I don't know kind of where I want to go with it. But for this one, I had to sit down with the text and just read it and go, what do we talk about here, God? What do we preach? What do we do? How do we direct? And as I read it, something became clear to me. And so I want to share that with you this morning. But to do that, what I'd like to do is just dive right into the story. So this story is found in Exodus chapter 14. I'm going to read the first four verses to kind of set it up. And then we're going to talk about it a little bit. So Exodus chapter 14 verses 1 through 4. So the Israelites did this. These instructions are essentially what I'd like you to do. Moses, take your people that are fleeing from the most powerful nation on the planet and move them back and forth across the desert in a nonsensical way. And then I would like for the conclusion of that meandering journey to be at the shore of the Red Sea so that Pharaoh will look at you and go, they don't know what they're doing. They're lost in the desert. Let's go get them. And when he decides to do that, you're going to be pinned against the sea. And then I'm going to do something to make my name great. And we're going to come back to that later. But what strikes me is these instructions are directed by God from God. They're very intentional. And he has a plan. And they make no sense. Right? Can you imagine being one of the tribal elders that Moses comes back to? And he's like, listen, I heard from God. Here's what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to go a few miles that way, and then a few miles that way, and then we're supposed to encamp a few miles that way, pinned against the coast of the Red Sea. And when we do that, Pharaoh's army is going to pursue us. If you were an elder in that situation, if you were an advisor in that situation, you would say, I think, I know I would, hey Moses, that doesn't make a lot of sense, man. Maybe that's not the best plan. Like, okay, meander around, let's do this a little bit, but is there a place to stop where we've got an escape route? Is there a place to stop where we can bail out, there's an exit hatch? Maybe the best thing to do, and I know that this is a wild idea, Moses, but maybe the best thing to do is just continue to move north away from Egypt and not meander in the desert and let Pharaoh watch us. Maybe that's the best idea. Moses, this doesn't make any sense. Isn't that the counsel that you would offer? As that came down the pipe, I know from talking with some of you in Bible study and socially, that sometimes there's decisions that are made three levels above you, and when they get to you, you're like, that is dumb. That doesn't make any sense. Why are we doing this? Wouldn't you feel that way if you were one of the Hebrew people and you're told we're going to be meandering here and here and here and then we're going to pin ourselves against the sea and we're going to let Pharaoh see us? That sounds like a terrible plan. But it's a God-directed plan. And so one of the first things that jumps out to me in this story is sometimes God tells us to do things that don't make sense. There are times in life when God will direct us to do things that don't make any sense. And this is a theme that's been coming up lately in our sermons and in what we've been talking about as a church. And I can't help but think that the Holy Spirit is pressing on some of us to do something that might not make sense on its face. That the Holy Spirit is pressing us to make a decision and to take a step that on its face doesn't make sense. On its face, if you were to tell the advisors and the people around you what you wanted to do, they would go, I'm not sure that's the wisest course of action. Maybe it's to quit your job and to pursue a different field. Maybe it's to stay in your job when all you want is to get out of your job. Maybe it's to end a relationship that's tenuous and hurtful, but you're scared to do it because you need it. Maybe it's an impetus to stay in a relationship that you think has a dead end and isn't going anywhere. But you just feel this press from God to stay in it. Maybe it's to quit something or to start something. But I do know that from time to time, the Lord will press on our hearts through the Holy Spirit for us to do things that might not make sense. I remember years ago in 2016 when I was looking for a job and becoming a senior pastor, moving on from being a staff pastor at my old church, Greystone, that my pastor preached a sermon on Abraham. And he pointed out that God spoke to Abraham when he lived in Ur in the Sumerian dynasty in the Middle East, probably modern day Iran. And he told him where Iraq, and he said, I want you, he woke him up and he said, I want you to get your things together, get your house together, get your wife, get your servants, get all your possessions. I want you to go to a place where I will show you. Not a specific place. Abraham didn't get to watch a YouTube video about the land of milk and honey to decide if he wanted to go there on vacation. He just had to go into the unknown. Just go that way and I'll let you know when you get there. And his point was sometimes God asks us to do things that don't make sense. And I was very convicted in that sermon because I was listening to that sermon and I'm thinking, we need to sell our house. We need to sell our house. I don't have a job yet. I don't know where we're moving. It doesn't make a lot of sense because we don't have a good place to go, but I know that we need to sell our house. And so I went home and I thought about it and I prayed about it. And that afternoon I went to Jen and I was like, hey, you're not going to like this. And I know that we don't have a place to move, but I think we need to sell our house. And she said, me too. What? She said, that's all I was thinking the whole sermon. We need to sell our house. And so we did. And for the next seven months, we lived with her parents and my parents. And then when I got hired by Grace, things were a little bit rushed. And I had two weeks from when I had my last Sunday at Greystone to when I preached my first Sunday at Grace. Two weeks. That is not enough time to sell a house. That is not enough time to get my affairs in order. But God pressed on us to do something that made no sense. And so we just felt like we were supposed to walk towards the sea. And we did. I have some good friends from that season of life, Heath and Ashley. And the sea that they walked towards was a lot scarier than ours. Heath was a staff pastor with me at Greystone. And I remember how he was and is a very dear friend of mine. If for no other reason than in 2013, he took me to the Masters. And I'll be forever grateful for that. I'll pretend to like him in hopes of further Masters visits after that. But I remember having a conversation with Heath when we were talking about spiritual gifts. And he said, what do you think my spiritual gifts are? And I said, honestly, I don't know. Maybe all of them. You're good at everything you do. He's so humble. He's so sweet. You would like him way more than you like me. Heath is great. And everything that he did just seemed to flourish. And by the time that both of us had matured in staff, he was a campus pastor in a city called Monroe, which was, you know, 35 minutes down the road from our main campus. And it was this quaint little southern town, a little bit like Wake Forest, but just better because Wake Forest stinks a little bit. And he bought this house downtown that was built in like the 1800s. And his wife, Ashley, is very eclectic and wonderful. And we love her. And we're actually going to see them in a few weeks when we go down to Florida. And it was just this perfect house for them. And they had two little girls. And it was just this really great thing. And they fixed up the house. And the house had appreciated in value really greatly. And they had set up this very nice life for themselves. And he's the campus pastor at a campus that's flourishing. And they just felt this press from the Holy Spirit, this direction like we see from God in verses one through four. Hey, I think I want you to go to seminary. And he felt this conviction that he needed to go to seminary. He had never been. He graduated from UGA with a degree in business and then got involved in church world and had never been to seminary. And so he felt like he needed to go. And he shared it with Ashley. And Ashley is one of these people. She was either convicted by the Holy Spirit or just so wild and free in her spirit that she was just like, yeah, let's do that. She's very adventurous. So he told Ashley, and they said, yeah, let's go to seminary. And so they sold everything they had, and they moved to Pasadena, California to go to Fuller Theological Seminary. And they lived in a student apartment. And if you've been to college and you've seen student apartments, those are a little bit less good than your own house in a small city, right? It was small, it was constricted, it was confined. Their little girls are meeting new people, going to a new school, a new environment. They really felt like God asked them, give up your comfortable life, move across the country, and I'll show you what I want you to do there. And so that's what they did. And when Heath told me this was his plan, I said, I don't think you need to do that. You're very successful in ministry. You're very good at what you do. But if this is what God's convicting you to do, then I think you should go. But it didn't make any sense to me. And I got off the phone with Heath and I looked at Jen and I was like, this doesn't make any sense. And she was like, that's weird. And I was like, I know. But they felt convicted and so they did and so they walked towards the sea. Sometimes in life, God asks us to do things that don't make any sense. But let me show you what happens when we follow through in obedience. First, we tend to come to a point of conflict. Exodus chapter 14, verses 10 and 11. As Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up and there were the Egyptians marching after them. They were terrified and cried out to the Lord. They said to Moses, was it because there was no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? Which I have to admit, until I dove into this story and was reading through to figure out what to preach and how to preach, I was unaware. This verse had never stuck out to me before, but it's one of the great sarcastic lines in the Bible. What have you done to us? Are there not enough graves in Egypt that you would bring us here to die? And then if you continue to read and you follow the discourse, some of them say, didn't we tell you in Egypt that we didn't want to do this? Didn't we tell you that we thought this was a bad idea? We were oppressed there, but we were alive. And now we're about to be mowed down by the army of Egypt. Because now what's happening when they say this, they're pinned against the Red Sea. They're shoreline and shoreline and nowhere to go. And in the distance is the armies of Pharaoh. And one detail that I think is interesting, because I'm silly, I just have to point this out. It says in the text that Pharaoh chose 600 of his best chariot men to go and to pursue the Israelites, which is great. But how do you determine the top 600 of anything? Like who was 601? You know? And was that guy like, I mean, come on, I'm at least 585. If not 590, this is bull. 601 has to be sour about it, right? It just seems like a really specific number. Anyways, I'm sorry. So they're pursuing the Israelites. And the Israelites say, why are we here? We told you this didn't make sense. They're raining down on us. We would have been better off if we did the other thing. This was a stupid decision. And so they come to this point of desperation where now they've done what they were supposed to do. And the only thing that can rescue them from their peril is an act of God. It's this point of desperation. And it reminds us that the reality is sometimes God asks us to do something, and we take that step of faith, and it opens up and it works out wonderfully. But most of the time, God asks us to do something, and we take a step of faith, and there is a process. There are things to wait on. We don't understand it fully. God told David, you're going to be the king of Israel, and then he waited 20 years. God called Moses to be the leader, and then he waited 40 years. God called Paul to be his witness to the Gentiles, and then he waited seven years. God called Peter, and Peter was a moron for three years, and then got it together and ministered well. Sometimes when we take a step of obedience, it works out right away, but most of the time time it's a process. And within that process, we will often reach a point of peril and desperation where we go, God, if you don't act, I don't know what to do. And it will cause us to question everything about the decision that we made. We will agree with the Egyptians. I was better off in the previous situation. I was better off with the previous resolution, with the previous decision, with the previous direction of guidance. I was better off then than I am now. Why did I do this? I regret quitting the job. That was a bad decision. I wish I could have it back. I regret starting this company. It was a bad decision. I wish I could have it back. I regret, I regret ending that relationship. I regret staying in this relationship. This is so hard. I regret moving to this school or to this place or to, or to go to this thing or to start this or to stop that. I regret it. It was wrong. And I wish I could have that previous life back. I wish I had a redo, God, because maybe I got it wrong. But when we follow God towards the sea, there is almost an inevitable moment where we will reach a point of desperation like the Israelites did and say, maybe I would have been better off if I had never done this. But it's at that point of tension that we reach the denouement, the climax of the story, the resolution of the event. In verses 26 through 28. It's at this point that chariotman 601 was 601 was like, thank goodness for that. God had a plan. He told Moses, raise your arms, close the sea. And he defeated this army of Egypt. And though I can't peer into the mind of God, I cannot know the mind of God. It makes sense to me that what God may have known, I'll just proffer this to you. You accept it or don't based on what you think. But I think it's possible that what God may have known is that Pharaoh is not going to just let you go. If you just scurry north, at some point or another, he will decide that he wants you back. And his army of trained soldiers and men on chariots and horses is faster than your entire three and four generations of families shuffling through the desert. It's faster than you. And if he wants to come get you, he will get you. And he will at some point, whether it's on the banks of the Red Sea, in the desert congruent to the Red Sea, or on the shores of the Jordan River, or even if he has to come back to Israel and reconquer you and bring you down. He will get you. I think this may be something that God knew. And so he knew that the Egyptian army needed to be conquered. And he knew that the Israelites didn't have the tools and the armies to do it. So he knew that he was going to need to step in. So what did he do? He told them, I want you to make yourself bait for Pharaoh. And I want you to put yourself in a completely vulnerable situation so that he will attack you. And when he does, look back at verse 4. Why did he do this? But I will gain glory for myself through Pharaoh and his army, and the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord. Sometimes God uses the nonsensical to spread his name. Sometimes he directs us towards nonsense, towards things that don't make sense, towards things that our friends would not advise us towards except for the will of God. And he uses it to spread his name. I remember having a conversation with Heath. They moved out to Pasadena. They lived in this small apartment. They were struggling, but they were good. They took all the equity that they gained from their home in Monroe, and they used it to live for those two years that he needed to do seminary to complete his degree and then towards the end of his seminary education I spoke with him and I was like what do you what are you gonna do because he had been a staff pastor and he didn't know what he wanted to do after seminary he just noted he wanted to be trained and he was listening to God go to this place and I will show you right then right? And so one day he calls me and he was like, hey, I think I know what I want to do. And I was like, great. What are you going to do? And this is what he said, because you're not going to believe. He said, I want to buy a laundromat. What? Why? He was like, I've been exposed to this really cool model of ministry where you own and operate a laundromat and you make it a point to spend your days there and you interact with the customers and you get to know them and you hear their stories. Because people who use laundromats are typically not affluent people. They've typically struggled. And they may be living a life where not very many people care about them. And so I want to show them care. I want to show them that Jesus loves them. I want to show them that they're seen. And I want to build community there. And I think Ashley and I can do this. And there's actually a model of ministry where they're building communities through laundromats and people are coming to Jesus as a result of it. And he said, that's what I want to do. And I said, Heath, that's stupid. That's a bad plan, man. I did. That's what I told him. But I laughed and he laughed and he said, I know. And I said, but if the Lord is directing you to do this, do it. Walk towards the sea. Go ahead. And so he did. And they, they moved, they, he graduated from seminary and they, they, they kind of looked all over the country and they settled on a suburb of Phoenix. And in the suburb of Phoenix, they began to save money for a laundromat, and Heath got another job with another missions organization where he's able to support people who spread Jesus' name throughout the world. And it's a good fit for him. And Ashley got a job as a teacher. And they have a daughter, Lucy, who's Lily's age. And Lucy and Lily have become pen pals. They write each other notes, and they send them to each other. And I should have grabbed one this morning. Jen's not home this weekend, so I didn't know where to find it. And I didn't want to bug her on a Sunday morning. But they are the sweetest little letters they write back and forth to each other. Lucy is the sweetest girl, but for whatever reason, she was having a really hard time at school. She was really getting bullied, really being ostracized, and it was a really hard time for them. And for them, I would point to that as a point of desperation. God, did you send us to seminary and then to Phoenix just to watch our daughter struggle? Wouldn't we have been better in our comfortable life, by the way, doing your ministry in Monroe? Wouldn't that have been better for us? But I believe that that was their point of desperation. And so from that, they've now moved to Tampa and they are thriving there and their story continues. And I do believe that God has walked them to the sea to make his name greater, but I don't know how their story ends. And we may not for a while. But I do know of another story of someone who had the faith to walk towards the sea. I want to introduce you to a hero of our faith, a man named George Mueller. He was born in 1805 in Germany. Here's a picture of him right there. He did not look like that when he was born. He's approximately eight years old in that photo. And he's got one of the cool German U's in his name, which is really neat. I'm jealous of that. But he was born in Germany in 1805. He immigrated to England later in life. And he was attending a church that had an attendance of 18, is what you read, which feels like a small group. But he went to a church of 18. And there he came to know that he already knew the Lord, but he became convicted because the pastor of that church and his wife decided that they were going to embark on a life of faith ministry where they were going to leave their job and go be missionaries and just rely on support from other people. But they were never going to ask for that support. They were just going to pray for it, which is a terrible idea. But they did it and they succeeded. They walked towards the sea. And so George was a pastor, and he went through some hard times with his children where they had a stillborn, and then he had a son, and that son passed away early in life. And that tremendous tragedy, there's nothing sadder than losing children. But it gave him a heart for orphans. It gave him a heart and it says for true orphans with no father and no mother. And so he decided to open an orphanage and then he decided to open multiple orphanages. But his thing was, oh, here's another thing about Mueller that's really interesting that I'm a little bit frustrated about. When he took over the church, you would rent pews. So your family would pay high dollar to sit where Tom and Linda are. This is an expensive pew right here. You guys in the back, you're barely doing anything. Who cares about you? But these are the important seats, right? You would rent a pew, and then that's how the church funded itself. But he looked at that and he said, this isn't right. It's ostracizing the poor people in the down and out. I don't like this anymore. So he eliminated pew rental, which was their source of income to run the church and for him to get paid. And he installed free will gifts, what we call offerings. He was one of the first pastors to invent offerings. And I'm kind of frustrated by it because that makes my life harder. It would be easier to charge you per sermon than it is to ask you to just give what you want. All right. So like when I get to heaven, me and George, I got a joke for him, man. Thanks a lot, buddy. But he just had this giving heart. He said, no, at church, we're not going to ask for people's money. We're going to do freewill offerings. And when he started his orphanages, he said, I'm not going to go around and collect support. I'm not going to charge families. I'm not going to apply for government support. All I'm going to do is pray. When we need something, I'm going to get on my knees and I'm going to pray that we would get it. That's all that he did. And he never went around asking for support. He never went around passing the hat. And now what we know about nonprofits is that that's exactly how you support the nonprofits. As you go around, as a missionary, you come up to the church, you stand up here, you tell your story. If you want to give, you can give. You have galas and you have banquets and you have functions and you have dinners at people's houses where you can share your story and you try to gain supporters. And then you and then we have this whole mechanism for philanthropy where emails go out and we're just keeping you up to date. And like, we know all of that stuff. And listen, I'm not impugning any of those systems or any of the people who have participated in those to support their ministry. I think that's a good thing. I have participated in those. I will continue to participate in those. But George Mueller said, that's not what I feel led to do. I'm just going to pray. And there are stories of him working in an orphanage and looking at the food resources and realizing at the end of this week, we do not have enough food to feed the children next week, and we do not have the money to buy new food. And so he would get down on his knees on the banks of the Red Sea with the army bearing down on him. And instead of fleeing, he would pray. He would pray for food. Father, I know you love these children. I know you care for them. I know you directed my steps here. Would you please provide for them? And every time God God provided. The man never walked around passing a hat. He is a legend in Christian circles. He's got a biography that is absolutely worth reading. And by the end of his life, by the end of his life, I have read that he cared for over 18,000 orphans without ever asking for a penny, without ever doing a single campaign. Through simply prayer, he allowed Jesus to wrap his arms, I'm getting emotional thinking about it, around 18,000 children with no parents. By the end of his life, I have read that he gave away the modern day equivalent of $129 million to ministries outside of his orphanages because he decided, I do not need a surplus to operate. I will pray and God will provide. That man walked towards the sea. He did what makes no sense. And as I tell that story of George Mueller, I think our tendency as we hear that is to say, well, that is exceptional. That is a man of tremendous faith. And you're right. But we also then look at ourselves and we say, but that's not me. I don't have that faith. I'm not going to do that. Or maybe you hear the story of my friends Heath and Ashley who sell their house and move across the country and go to seminary and then buy a laundromat in Tampa, which is weird. And you're like, yeah, I'm not going to do that. I don't think that God is calling me to do that. And so I think what we do is we hear stories like that that we consider heroic or courageous at the very least. And we kind of categorize them as for the exceptional, but not for me. And as I thought about that, it just occurred to me that very few of us have the courage to walk towards the sea. Very few have the courage to walk towards the sea. Very few of us have the courage to sell our house, move across the country, and fundamentally change our life for our girls. Which, by the way, Heath's mom openly wept for days when he said he was moving away because their family is very tight-knit and has lived in the same city for four or five generations. Very few of us have the courage to do that. And so when we hear stories like that, I think the typical reaction is to say, well, I don't know that I can relate to that. You're probably right, because statistically speaking, most of us don't have the courage to walk towards the sea. Most of us want that escape route. But if we'll do it, if we'll walk there, there may be a point of desperation. There may be a time when we regret our choice. But God will come through. And he will come through to use you to make his name great. George Mueller did not know that he was going to be written about in history books and that someone would write a biography and that every seminary student would hear about him. He just walked towards the sea. And I don't know what God is pressing on you to do. I don't know what he's pressing on you to start or stop or engage in or follow through with. But here's what I know. I know that for some of you, I know that for everyone in here, God wants you to do something. He wants you to take some step. He's pressing something on you. And I know that for a few of you, that is ringing loud in your ears. And you know exactly what it it is and you wish I'd let up on it. So some of you need to have the courage to walk towards the pond or the creek. Some of you are facing a sea. But I think what we can take from the story of the parting of the Red Sea is that when God tells us to do something nonsensical and walk towards the ocean, that we can do it in faith that he will make it work, that he will provide and that he will do it to make his name great. So this morning, let me encourage you from this story. Have courage, have faith, and walk towards the sea. Let's pray. Father, thank you so much for this story that we read in Exodus, for what you did for your children, for what you still do now. God, I pray that we would take faith and comfort and solace from what you did. God, I know that there are some of us that you have directed to walk towards a pond, and there are some of us that you have directed to walk towards an ocean. But Father, give us the courage and the faith and the fortitude to step forward in that way and to take those steps and to allow you to pin us against an ocean needing you desperately to resolve the situation. God, we thank you for the story and for what we can learn from it. And God, I pray specifically for those that feel compelled by the Holy Spirit to walk towards the sea. Please give them the courage to do that. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor, one of the pastors here. Thanks for joining us this morning. If you're joining us online, we're so glad you're doing that, wherever you are, whatever you're doing. And I'm excited for this morning. And I know this section of the church here, that your general mentality is, yeah, the good part's over, so let's go, buddy. I'll try, okay? I'll try. I've got a lot to cover. I've got to see how adroitly I can move through all of the points and the stories in Moses' life, but we're going to drive to one large point today that I want us to see. This is the first Sunday in our summer-long series on the life of Moses. I think, what's it called? The Life and Journey of Moses. Wonderful. I tell the graphics department, which is Aaron and Carly, that this is what I'm going to preach about, and then they come up with the titles. So I never know what the series is called. We're going to spend 14 weeks in the life of Moses. And the reason we're going to do this is last year, I sat down with the staff and I wrote out all the books of the Bible and all the major characters of the Bible. And then we looked at the last five years worth of series and said, what are the gaps? What are the things that we haven't spent time on that we need to spend time on? And one of the most glaring ones was the life of Moses. And because of how impactful it is and how important it is in scripture. So this morning, rather than settling in on any particular instance in the life of Moses, I want to look at a bunch of them because I believe that they elicit a question. And just for the record, just so we know, Owen won the baptism contest. He did. He nailed it. That was great. I want us to move, we're going to do an overview of the life of Moses, move through and just kind of hit on different instances because Moses' life, more than any other life in the Bible, in my belief, more than any other account in the Bible, elicits a question more than any other story, more than any other person, more than any other life. You could say that Joseph is close, Moses' predecessor. You could say that David is close, but I don't think there's any other life in the Bible that elicits this question this much and kind of defines the story of Moses, which is simply this. God, what are you doing? God, what are you doing? What's going on right now? As we go through the life of Moses, you'll see this pop up again and again. God, I don't understand what you're doing right now. And in this way, I believe we can all relate to Moses because we have all at times asked that question, God, what are you doing? What's going on? I don't understand. When something's going wrong with our children and we don't know how to fix it, God, what are you doing? When someone gets sick and they aren't healed and we love them so much and they're so young, God, what are you doing? When there's big instances that happen, the big calamitous things that happen over and over again, it seems in the news, when wars happen, we say, God, this is not how I would do this. Like, God, what are you doing? When we're trying really hard to be parents and have a baby and we can't, God, what are you doing? And then when you miscarry a baby, God, what are you doing? And so I think many of us, if not all of us, have had a moment and probably a lot more than that in our life where we ask the fundamental question of the life of Moses, God, what are you doing? So what I want to do this morning is show you what I'm talking about. Show you these different instances where Moses or the nation or the people around Moses couldn't help but throw up their hands and say, God, why is this happening? What are you doing? What is going on? And we start it right out of the gate. If you have notes, you just have a list of scriptures on that note. So you can kind of see where I'm going to go. There's not a lot of blanks to fill in this morning, but you'll have the references and you can scratch the instances next to them if you want to, because I'm going to go through these and then I'm going to show you kind of what I believe is the point of all of these things. But right out of the gate, we see this verse, these verses in Exodus chapter 2, verses 3 and 4. But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him. So here's the context of this mama putting a baby in a basket and floating that basket down the river. The Hebrew people, the descendants of Abraham, somewhere between, scholars think it's somewhere between 200 and 400 years earlier, settled into Egypt. Because Joseph, one of the sons of Israel, Jacob, who was to become Israel, Abraham's grandson, ended up moving down to Egypt. It's a whole big thing, but he got in a position of big power. And because of his power and because of famine in the land, his family, his brothers, who would become the 12 tribes of Israel, moved down there too and settled in the land of Goshen, which is part of the land of Egypt. Then you fast forward. You turn the page from Genesis, which tells that story, among some others, but spends most of his time there. You turn the page from Genesis, and you get to Exodus. And in Exodus, what's going on is those Israelites have been there for generations. And the pharaohs that were favorable to them have gone, and there's new pharaohs. And now they're so numerous that the pharaoh at the time is worried that they would become so strong that they would be able to overtake the Egyptians and escape, and they wouldn't have their workforce anymore. So he tells the midwives, the Egyptian nurses that help with deliveries, if a woman has a girl, let the girl live. If the woman has a boy, take the boy's life to cut the male population of the Hebrew people. Well, Moses' mom was able to have him before the midwives got there. And so she was then hiding him, loving him, weaning him, caring for him. And eventually he started making too much noise as kids are wont to do. It did not take my kids three months to make too much noise, I'll tell you that. Eventually he started making too much noise and she realizes they're gonna find out about him and to come take him from me, and they're going to kill him. So the only thing she could do to save his life is put that baby in a basket and float that basket down the river. Just as an aside, I've preached a whole sermon about this on Mother's Day because I think that's what parenthood is. At the end of the day, you put your child in the basket, and you float it down the river, and you trust it to God, right? So she does that. And I can't help but think and be rather certain that during that season and during that time, with this is the kind of the real picture of it, not the personification of it, but a microcosm of it is, God, what are you doing right now? Why are you letting them kill our sons? God, why do I have to float my son down a river? So even Moses's life before he's even cognitive of what's happening around him starts with this question, God, what are you doing? Then we fast forward and we go to Exodus 2, 23 and 25. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them. Preceding this verse, in the second half of chapter 2, is the account of the time that Moses came out of, I assume, the palace and was moving through the city, and he saw two Egyptian guards beating some Hebrew people. And he was inflamed with anger, and he went to protect them, and he ended up murdering these two guards. And this was seen by other people. And they reported him to the Egyptian guards. So now there's a price on his head and they're trying to actively arrest and kill Moses. So Moses has to flee. And he ends up fleeing to a place called Midian which was far enough away for him to not have to worry about the law anymore trying to get him. And he falls in with a guy named Jethro who has seven daughters. He marries one of the daughters, Zipporah, and he becomes a shepherd for 40 years. He's in the desert. Far away from the life that he had built and from the people that he knew. He had to flee. And at the end of this fleeing, the people cry out to God, what are you doing? What's going on with this slavery? And I can't help but wonder, this is speculation, you go here with me if you want to, but I can't help but wonder if they thought we had one voice in the palace that could advocate for us that Pharaoh might be sympathetic towards, and now he's just made a mistake and he's gone out into the wilderness. God, what are we doing? Who's going to save us? This is too much. This is too oppressive. And it says God heard their groanings and remembered his covenant with Abraham. Then very quickly in the narrative, we move to the next big scene in Moses's life, which is Moses and the burning bush. That's in Exodus three and four, two of, I think the best chapters in the Old Testament. And I'm not going to belabor this story because we're going to spend the next two weeks in that story. But Moses is in the desert. He's a shepherd. He's tending to his sheep. And he looks over and there's a bush that's on fire and it's not diminishing. And so he wanders over to check it out and the fire says to him, you're on holy ground, take off your shoes. And he's like, oh, this is God. And God says to him, I want you to go to Pharaoh, the most powerful man in the known universe, and tell him to let his free workforce go. That's what he says. I want you to go to Pharaoh and tell him to let my people go. And so they have a back and forth. And we're going to get into this back and forth next week with Moses' five excuses that I think are pretty great. But the one that I think is most interesting and kind of most indicative of his struggle is in chapter 4, verse 10, where it says, Moses said to the Lord, pardon your servant, Lord.. And Moses says, but why me? I'm not eloquent. I never have been. I'm not silver-tongued. And beyond that, I just spent 40 years talking to sheep in the desert every day. And when he says I'm slow of speech and tongue, there are some Hebrew scholars that believe that that is indicative of a speech impediment, that he could have possibly had a stutter or something that would cause him to speak slowly and unevenly. He was not the man to go have political negotiations with the most powerful leader on the planet. So he says, why me, God? I'm slow of speech and of tongue. And God's response, if you read on, is, I will be adequate for you. I don't need you to be adequate. I will be adequate for you, so go. But it's like, then the question, and in the five excuses, God, what are you doing? You've got the wrong guy. Who's sending me? Well, I am sending you. Who should I say sent me? And God says, I'm not going to tell you my name. Why? What are you doing? He says, no one's going to trust me. And he said, I'll make them. Why? What are you doing? Every excuse is, God, what are you doing? But he goes faithfully, and he goes to Pharaoh, and he says, let my people go. And Pharaoh says, no chance. And then we have the famous ten plagues, right? The frogs and the locusts and the blood and the boils and all the things. We have the famous 10 plagues. And now we don't know how long of a period of time the plagues cover. Was there one a day for 10 days? Was there one a week for 10 weeks? It could have been months or maybe even years. There's not a lot of information to tell us what the span of time was during the plagues. But you've got to think that by the time they got to the 10th one, the growing question in everyone's brain was, God, what are you doing? These plagues ain't working, man. Pharaoh's not budging. God, what are you doing? And then the last one is, hey, I'm going to send the angel of death over the camp. And everyone who doesn't do a certain thing is going to lose their firstborn son. We see this in chapter 11, verse 1. Now the Lord said to Moses, I will bring one more plague on Pharaoh and on Egypt. After that, he will let you go from here. One is, hey, the plagues aren't really working. So like what's going on, God? What's happening right now? And then the other one is, hey, what I want you to do for this particular plague to save your firstborn son is I wanted you to take the blood of a lamb, of a splatless lamb, and I want you to paint it on the doorposts of your house. And when the angel of death sees that perfect blood on the doorposts of your house, he will pass over, which is where we get the holiday Passover, he will pass over your house and move on to the next one. And I can't help but think that as Phil Leverett as the dad is out there the afternoon before Passover with the fresh blood from the lamb that he probably borrowed from Cam, that he's taking the blood of the lamb and putting it on his doorpost and saying, God, what are we doing? This doesn't make any sense. But okay, if this is what I have to do. The angel of death comes. There was great weeping and wailing in Egypt that night. The cry was great. And sure enough, Pharaoh drives them out. Says, okay, get out of here. You're a curse on our nation. Get lost. And here's a funny little detail from this story that I don't know if I'll be able to point out again. But all the housekeepers, all the women in Israel who were housekeepers of the rich Egyptian social class or whatever, they knew that they were going to be leaving the next day. So on their last day at work, they pilfered the Egyptians. And the Bible says, and so they plundered them. They took all their gold and all their silver. They just grabbed it all, put it in their dresses, and went home. And so they had some extra nickels on the trip to Israel. And I think that's funny. So they leave. They're driven out. They're in the desert. They've made their escape. And then they get pinned up against the banks of the Red Sea. And they cry out again. As Pharaoh approaches in chapter 14, verse 10, as Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up, and there were the Egyptians marching after them. They were terrified and cried out to the Lord. They said to Moses, was it because there was no graves? I love this sarcasm. Was it because there was no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? So they're on the banks of the Red Sea. They have a choice to drown or to be slaughtered by Pharaoh's encroaching army. And they're bearing down on them. And they cry out and they look at Moses and they say, what are you doing? God, what are you doing? Did you bring us here because there's not enough graves in Egypt. Is that why you did this? Is that why you did all the plagues and all the things so that you could bring us here to die? What in the world, God, this doesn't make any sense. God, what are you doing? And then we know that God parts the Red Sea. They run through and the army is crushed, but they don't know that. So they're saying, what's going on? They're groaning. Why did you bring us here to die? It doesn't make any sense. But they get through. And they go. And then they're in the desert. And as they're in the desert, they're hungry. Because there's not much to eat. And there are, scholars will tell you that there were probably between 200,000 and 500,000 people moving through the desert. That's a logistic nightmare to feed. And so they're hungry. And they're calling out to God. And I can just imagine being a father watching my children be hungry every day, not sure if I was going to be able to get them food. And watching my wife sacrifice her food for them. I can only imagine how angry I would be. And how sad I would be. And how my sentiment would be, God, what are you doing? Why did you bring us out into the desert to starve? And so they cried out to God. And they complained to Moses and Aaron, and this in the cloud. The Lord said to Moses, I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites. Tell them at twilight you will eat meat, and in the morning you will be filled with bread. Then you will know that I and the Lord your God. This is the genesis of manna, something that we probably have heard of before. And he says, tonight I'm going to let you eat quail. It's going to be a feast. But here's the deal. Don't get any more than you can eat. It's like when you take your kid to a buffet. Only get what you know you can eat. And their eyes get real big and you've got to try to figure it out. Only get what you know you can eat. Thank you for laughing at that joke. And then he said, the next morning there's going to be bread. But same rules apply. Don't store it. Don't be greedy. Only get what you need for that day. And so the next morning they wake up and there's these white flakes on the ground and they're like, what in the world is this? And they call it, and that's what manna means. What is it? And Moses says, that's the bread that the Lord has provided. God, what are you doing? We're hungry and we're starving. And why is it this weird bread that we can only take just enough of for the day? What's the harm in stockpiling bread? This doesn't make any sense, God. Why? What are you doing? Then they near the end of their journey in the desert. They're on the banks of the Jordan River. They're looking across the Jordan River at the promised land where Abraham lived and where Israel and his sons migrated from down into Egypt. And now, hundreds of years later, they've returned to claim their promised land. This is the land of milk and honey. The problem is there are now other peoples and tribes that occupy that land. And so Moses and Aaron collected 12 spies and sent them across the Jordan River. And they said, go scout the place out. Let's go figure out what we're dealing with and figure out how to conquer this territory because they knew they were going to have to conquer it. They couldn't just go to them and be like, hey, listen, there's been a big mistake. This is actually ours. So that's not going to work. So they're going to have to war over it. So they send the spies, and then the spies come back with this report in Numbers chapter 13, verses 26 through 29. They came back to Moses and Aaron and the whole Israelite community at Kadesh in the desert of Paran. There they reported to them and the whole assembly and showed them the fruit of the land. They gave Moses this account. We went into the land to which you sent us, and it does flow with milk and honey. Here's its fruit. But the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large. We even saw descendants of Anak there. The Amalekites live in Negev, the Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites live in the hill country, and the Canaanites live near the sea and along the Jordan. I just want to say, I dare any of you guys to read those words out loud like that. I had to practice this morning. Thank you, Lord. One of the things that's interesting there is if you read below in the text, the sons of Anak were known to be descendants of giants. And so they were much larger men than the Hebrew people were. And so they come back and they go, yeah, that's the land of milk and honey. Here's the fruit. It's pretty amazing. God was right. He did a good job picking a good plot of land. The problem is there's powerful armies and powerful fortified cities and we can't go. God, what are you doing? Why did you bring us here to a promised land that we're supposed to take over that we've been journeying through the desert waiting on for 40 years now. And we can't even occupy the land because we don't have the strength to do it. God, what are you doing? Now, here's what I want to do. I'm going to go back through them very quickly. All of those instances where they said, God, what are you doing? And I'm going to tell you based on scripture, what God was doing. I'm going to tell you what I think he was up to, because I want us to see a much larger point. You go back to the very first instance of his mom floating that basket down the river. God, what are you doing? Well, I'll tell you what he's doing. He knows that Moses is going to be the first leader of his people that has to install civics and laws and leadership and war and generalizing and trade and negotiations. And there is nobody in the Hebrew community that has ever had any experience at that at all. So what does he do? He takes the future leader and he plants him right in the middle of the palace of the most powerful person in the world and gives him access to the greatest education in the world and gives him access to all the kinds of conversations that country leadership is going to require of him that he would have never had access to if he had stayed amongst the Hebrew people. So he was, God sent him to the palace, I believe with my whole heart, to be trained in a unique way that nobody else could. Then after he gets trained, okay, I'm ready, he murders two people and he gets sent out to the desert. And he stays in the desert for 40 years. God, what are you doing? You trained me up. I have to have a larger purpose than this. Moses doesn't know what he's been trained for yet, but I'm sure that he had an idea of his life that wasn't to flee everything that I know and the opulence of the palace and all the conveniences of life that I experience as this privileged kind of Egyptian Hebrew person. God, why am I here? Well, Moses had to be humbled. This happens over and over again in scripture. God calls Paul. Paul goes to the wilderness for seven years. God calls David to be king. David's on the run for 20 years being humbled. He calls Joseph to be the leader under the Egyptian people. Joseph is a prisoner for 20 years. It happens over and over and over again. And all of those times are instances of God humbling and shaping the character of the person that he intends to use, shaving off the rough edges. Clearly Moses was a hothead. He murdered two dudes. Clearly he didn't have the patience and the grace and the diplomacy to be a leader of a nation. And so God sent him to the desert to be molded and shaped and humbled. Then he calls Moses. And Moses says, you got the wrong guy. What are you doing? I stutter. And God says, hey, listen, you need to learn to depend on my adequacy, not your inadequacy. You're right. You are inadequate for the task. You are not the obvious choice. But I'm choosing you because, and you need to know right now, there's going to be a lot more instances where you're going to be inadequate for the task. And you're going to have to trust on my adequacy. He's teaching Moses to trust him. Then he goes to Pharaoh. And he says, let my people go. And Pharaoh says, no. And then they have the plaguesagues and we go, what is going on with this? God, they're not working. And the last one works. And it's, they had to be saying, God, why this plague? This is pretty rough. This is pretty brutal. And why are you having me paint the blood of a lamb on a doorpost? I'll tell you why. Because if you were to go home right now and you were to take, let's just say Bayer, not like blood and, or DuPont, whatever your choice is, I don't care. And you took that and you were just painting a strip of it on the doorpost. You'd put it in the middle and you'd put it on the sides at about shoulder height. That's the perfect blood of a lamb in the shape of a cross. And by that blood, I will protect your firstborn son. Because God knows 4,000 years later, his firstborn son is going to hang on the cross and shed the blood of a perfect lamb. And by that blood, our firstborn sons are saved and all people are saved for all of time. It's a picture of what God is going to do there. He frees the people. They're at the banks of the Red Sea. God, what are you doing? Did you bring us out here to die? Are there not enough graves in Egypt? He parks the Red Sea. He runs them through it. He knew that Pharaoh and his anger and his frustration and his haste would trudge through the middle of the Red Sea too. And then he collapses the waters on the most powerful army in the world, ending the existential threat to his people. And they get through and they're hungry. Why did you bring us here if you're not going to feed us? So he says, I'm going to give you bread, but you can only take enough for each day. You can't be greedy with it. Why? Because Jesus is the bread of life. And 4,000 years later, he's going to come and live a perfect life and die a perfect death. And he's going to be sufficient for us. He's going to be all we need. We will never hunger or thirst again. Manna is a picture of Jesus and an assurance of God's provision for his people. And that's what he wants us to learn from it. Finally, they're at the banks of the Jordan River. They're about to approach the promised land. And they check it out. They can't do it. Ten of the spies said, no go. But Joshua and Caleb were men of faith. And they said, if this is where God wants us to go, we can. And they led the armies through Canaan under the power of God, conquering their way all the way through what we know of as Israel. And they settled in the promised land. And it's a picture of our promised land where we will ultimately go after our life's journey. And it is impossible for us to get there on their own, but through the power and the provision of God, he's made a way for all of us to enter that promised land. Do you understand that every instance in the life of Moses and what happens with the Hebrew people is an opportunity for God to show his sovereignty and his goodness. Here's what I want you to see from that. This one thing, this one assurance that I want us to keep locked in as we go through this series. God knew what he was doing then and he knows what he's doing now. God knew in every instance when they said, God, what are you doing? God knew. He rarely explained himself, but God knew. And he knew then what he was going to do, and he knows now what he's going to do. He knew their story when they didn't. And they said, God, why are you writing it this way? And he just thought, one day you'll see. You all have things in your life where you go, God, what are you doing? Why is this happening? And let me just tell you, God knows now why it's happening. And you might know later. But God knows now. We don't know. These wonderful kids that we baptize and these great families, we don't know where they're going to go. But God does. So there's going to be hardships in their life, and they're going to cause us to cry as parents and grandparents. And we're going to go, God, what are you doing? He knows now what he's doing. He knows then and he knows right now. So my hope as we go through this life of Moses, which puts on marvelous display the assuring and comforting sovereignty of God. My hope is that as we go through it, we'll see over and over again that God knew what was going on. God knew what he needed, and he's not just thinking generationally, he's thinking millennially. I don't know what's happening in your life. I don't know what stories he will write with you, but God does, and the story of Moses helps us to see that we can trust him. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your sovereignty. Thank you for our ability to rest in it if we would so choose. Thank you for the way that you weave the story of Moses and the Israelites and how you looked after them as a heavenly father in a way that you look after us. God, for those of us who are in the middle of a situation where we don't know what you're doing, would you remind us that you do and that we can trust you? God, we thank you for this morning. We thank you for these amazing baptisms and the pictures that they are and the families that they represent and the prayers that culminate in them. We pray over those children that you would write an incredible story with them. And we are so grateful that you already know what it is. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, Grace. I'm Erin. I do get the privilege of being one of your pastors. And as my daughter just said a second ago, an all-purpose pastor. I just found that one as a funny little whatever. So thanks, Zoe. I appreciate that. And I appreciate everyone being in the building today. I know how easy it is when you hear that Nate isn't preaching to just say that you're going to sleep in that day. I get it, and it's okay. So thank you for coming and giving me someone to speak to. I do appreciate that. And a little, for those of you guys that don't know, Nate is on his way to Istanbul, Turkey. He's going to participate for the next week in helping to train up some Iranian pastors so that they can go and preach the gospel. So he's excited and thrilled. And I just spoke with Jen and the update is, is he's in the air. He's left Germany and he's next stop is Istanbul. So keep him in your prayers as we kind of move forward this week. That would be appreciated. So I wanted to start our morning this morning with a question. And my question to you is, what are you afraid of? And I got to thinking about people's fears. I know what some of mine are. And I decided to do just a little research and see exactly what other people were afraid of. And so I Googled it. And that does count as research. Don't judge. It counts. But I Googled it, and it's amazing how many top ten lists you can find when you Google things. So a couple of ones in no particular order that popped up was aerophobia, which is the fear of flying. And I know there's probably somebody in this room that is kind of up in that category. There was also acrophobia, which is the fear of heights. I fall squarely in that category. You can ask my family. They have lots of stories of me in heights. And none of them are pretty, I promise. There was also arachnophobia. And I know this one is quite a few of y'all because they made a movie about this. It's the fear of spiders. I have an aunt who, strong woman, nurse, nothing bothered her, but a spider could send her screaming in a pass down the road. It was bad. And then there was another one called glossophobia, but it's the fear of public speaking, which, as you can, that one's not one of mine. I know it happens to be a lot of other people's. I've had conversations, and people have told me that they'd rather die than actually stand up in front of a group of people. And so, guess what? Death and dying is also up there on that list. And so are snakes. I may fall in that category too. So there's all of these different fears out there, things that people are afraid of. And this will all make sense in a minute, but you're going to see where my brain goes sometimes. So I was like, what is a fear? What, what, what is a fear? So I looked that one up too. I love Google by the way. Um, and Webster's dictionary defines a fear as a strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger. So basically it is some sort of physical response to keep, it helps to keep us safe. It's a way that we're wired that helps to keep us safe okay so that makes a lot of sense but then I got to thinking to my fear of heights is not something that keeps me up at night I don't think your fear of spiders is what wakes you up at 3 a.m. questioning all the things. Am I right? Yeah, probably so. But does that mean that it's not a fear? No. The things that are keeping us up in the middle of the night are things like fear of failure or fear of loneliness or fear of change or inadequacy or judgment or rejection and I think the list could go on and on and you have yours, whatever it may be. These are still real fears, but these fears are caused by a belief system. Something that we've heard, felt, or otherwise. It's not a reaction to danger. It's coming from someplace internal. So how do you combat these fears then? I know how to combat fear of heights, right? I just don't go anywhere where it's tall. That's easy. You can stay away from spiders. Those are easy things that you can avoid. But how do you combat the things that are waking you up at 3 a.m.? What do you do? Again, I googled it. What's the opposite of fears? It's something called faith. The definition of faith is a complete trust or confidence in someone or something. And the writers and Hebrews actually state that having faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance of what we do not see. And that sounds like a really spectacular place to live. Confident in what I hope for, assured in what I do not see, and I wish I could stand before you and tell you that's exactly where I live my life. But I'd be lying. And you know, that's kind of looked down upon in church. So I'll be completely honest. I wish I had that faith every single day. But you know, I'm just like everybody else. I struggle with all these things that happen in my head. I'm a people pleaser. So lo and behold, I'm always afraid. Have I made somebody mad? Or are they judging me? Or am I truly equipped to do what it is that I do? And so the thing about that, though, is that those fears and those things that swirl around in my head, they don't discount the faith that I do have. Because the thing to remember here is, is that when you're afraid, you can still have faith. Because faith isn't the absence of fear, but it's trusting God in the face of it. So your faith is not going to happen without fear. Because what we're called to do then is to not allow this fear to take over, but to learn to trust and lean in to God. And in doing so, our faith starts to become bigger than our fears. So today I want to jump into Mark 5. So I am going backwards from where Nate was. It's just the way I do things. I can't follow along in his pattern. I have to do it my way, right? So I'm going to jump over to Mark chapter 5. We're going to start in verse 21 through 24. I'm going to read those to you, but if you want to grab your Bibles, you guys can follow along. I'm going to do a great deal of probably summarizing as we continue through, just because this is actually a long passage. So 5, 21 through 24, and a great crowd followed him and thronged about him. So here we meet Jairus, who is a ruler in the synagogue. An important point to kind of make here is that this doesn't mean he's a religious leader. He's not exactly a Pharisee or Sadducee. What he is is probably equivalent to one of our elders. He actively takes place in what happens inside of the synagogue. He helps to take care of the building. He's going to be well established in his community. He'll be well thought of in his community and respected. And here he stands with a daughter who is dying. The word that's used here is death is imminent. Like this isn't a long, drawn out process. She's probably got hours to live is what it's referring to here. And so he is coming to Jesus at this moment in his life. And I think back to what are the fears that he had before he took those steps. What fears were going through his brain like what goes through ours. And you can only imagine as a leader in the community. He's possibly fearing loss of status in the community. Or fearing the fact that he's going to lose respect. The other one too is that currently the religious community was not too keen on Jesus, right? They're still not sure who he is at this point. He's out teaching, he's out healing, he's out doing all of the things. He's drawing large crowds everywhere he goes. People aren't quite sure who he is, but the religious community had taken note, and they weren't real happy with him. And so for Jairus to step out, there's a risk, right, of him losing his status completely inside of the religious community. But he does it anyway, right? And Jesus' response to him, which I absolutely love, is he doesn't say a word. Jairus is at his feet and he says, come heal my daughter. And all Jesus does is follow Jairus to his house. Doesn't call him out. Doesn't make a big deal out of it. Just follows him. And so they head off to his house. And if we continue on in scripture, and I'm not going to read this, this is part of the areas where I'm going to kind of summarize things. We meet, they, as they're headed in this large crowd of people on their way to Jairus' house, they come across a woman who is physically ill. She has, scripture states that she's been bleeding for 12 years. She has spent all of her money and all of her resources trying to find a cure. Very unsuccessful. And at this point in time, she's actually worse off than what she was when it started. So she's going to be physically weak. She is an outcast in her community. But she has a belief in her head that if she can only get to Jesus and if she can only touch his garment, she just knows that he can heal her. But what does it take for her to get to him? Because can you imagine what's going through her brain? First of all, she's physically weak. So there has to be this fear of what happens if I don't make it? What happens if I can't get to him through all of these people? I'm going to be like this for the rest of my life. Like my last shot at healing. There's also, I said before, she's an outcast. The thing here is that Jewish ceremonial law stated that she was unclean because she had been bleeding. And by being unclean, that meant that anything or anyone that she touched, she made unclean also. And then there's a whole litany of things that must be done to make that person or that thing clean again. So people avoided her. She had no contacts. She was not allowed in the synagogue at all. We don't know, according to scripture, if she even had a family. But if she did have a family, she would not have been with them. She would have been secluded from them. So I can't even imagine how this woman felt. There was no human touch for 12 years. No one looking at her and making contacts for fear of them becoming unclean. So she makes a choice and she chooses to go to Jesus. Both Jairus and this woman's example to us are huge. That when life gets hard, we can either give in to our fears or we can step forward in faith. Both these people in the midst of places of desperation, places of being like their life was just super hard. They made a conscious choice to choose faith over fear. And I promise you, and I know this in my life, sometimes it's easier to give in to the fear. It's just easier. Because when life's hard, those voices in the head get louder and louder, and sometimes it's just easier to give into that. The step of faith is the hard part, but it's in that hard that we grow and that our faith continues to grow as well. 20, 25 years ago, there was a leadership team inside of a large church in Raleigh. A very large, successful church in Raleigh. There was a lot of things happening inside of this church at this period of time. It was successful, yes, but internally there was stuff going on. Stuff with the denomination people weren't sure There were some decisions that were being made by the large denomination that the leadership team was unsure of There's lots of prayer happening and so on and so forth there was a decision that eventually was made after much prayer except that the leadership team was going to step away from the church and start their own church. They had fears, as you can only imagine. It's a large church in a large area, well-known, well-respected, and here is a group that says, we're going to leave. So there's a chance for loss of reputation. They also know that there's a chance that there's going to be some hurt that happens as they make this decision to pull away. There's lots of places of fear. They also are walking away from a steady paycheck in a way that they're taking care of their families. But they stepped out. They did it. And then they got together, they prayed, they did all their things. They found a little outdoor pavilion to hold a first worship service to see what would happen. And lo and behold, they got there that morning, they set up their little PA system, they put out some chairs, and they waited. And God did his thing. Because over the hill came car after car after car. And all of a sudden, all of the chairs are full. And the next thing you know is there's a full hill of people sitting in the grass. And I was one of them. And I had my husband, my sweet husband was with me. And Zach was there as well as a two-month-old and a car carrier. And we And so just like Jairus and just like the woman, they followed Jesus. They didn't give in, and they kept moving forward. And just like what happened with Grace, the same thing happens with Jairus and with this woman. And Jesus' response to their faith is immeasurably more than they could have ever asked or imagined. Because in the story of the woman, she now reaches out and she touches Jesus' cloak and she is immediately healed, but Jesus isn't done with her. He knows that she's physically healed. Her bleeding has stopped and she's now physically healed, but he knows she's not healed mentally or physically or mentally or emotionally yet. And that's where he has to take her. So in the middle of this crowd that's pushing all around him, he stops and he says, who touched my garments? Okay. There's a lot of people touching your garments, Jesus. Lots of people. But that wasn't for anybody but that woman. And so many times I've read that passage and I kind of, in my head, I heard Jesus like it was an accusation. Like he kind of wheeled around and was like, who touched me? But really, it was the opposite. It was him reaching out with an invitation. He's like, who touched my garments? He's calling to her to come to him, not to embarrass her, but to continue her healing. And that's what she does. She comes forward. She comes forward in fear and in trembling, and she falls at Jesus's feet. And scripture tells us that she tells the whole truth. This is her whole story. She lays out the good, the bad, the ugly, all of the things from the last 12 years, all of the things that she tried to do to fix herself and was very unsuccessful. All of her pain, all of her suffering, all of it, she laid at his feet. When was the last time any of us laid it all at Jesus's feet? When was the last time we followed her example with whatever our circumstance, whatever it is that has us, and we just laid it at his feet and said, this is my story. This is where I am. This is what hurts. This is where I'm mad. This is where I don't understand. This is what I've tried to do on my own. And hey, I'm sorry. When was the last time any of us took the time to do that? When did we actually give it all up? And you can see here the example that Jesus gives and how he's going to respond because he looks at her and he says, daughter. It's such a term of endearment. And he tells her, your face has healed you. Go in peace and be free of this disease. So those words right there and this interaction with Jesus, what he's now officially done is not only did he heal her physically, but by calling her out, he just healed her in her social status. He just said to everybody that's standing around, she's clean. She can come back to you. So after 12 years, she can now, if she had a family, she can go back to her family. She can go back to the synagogue. She's now reunited with her community. And lastly, I think this is an example to Jairus. Because so often God uses our circumstances and our stories to encourage others. Because remember at this point in time, Jairus is still here. He's not mentioned right now, but he's still here. He's standing there. Jesus has led him to this spot and then stopped it. And can you imagine Jairus at this moment? You have a child who's on the verge of death. You were on your way with your healer. You knew she was about to be healed. And all of a sudden it stops while the healer goes off to take care of somebody else. What goes on in my head is Jairus is like pacing. Like he's got to be like, wait, hey Jesus, like what about me? Don't forgive me. My daughter's the one that's dying. I know she's sick. Well, you can come back. We gotta go. Like, time is urgent here. We need to go. And he's wringing his hands and he's pacing and he's doing all of the things. And yet Jesus is still focused straight in on this woman. And the wait. Jesus, you brought me here and now you're going to make me wait. I don't understand. And so what do we do in these waiting moments? When we know Jesus has brought us to this place, I'm here because you brought me here. Why am I sitting and spinning? And what's happening? Where are you in this moment? And so if we go back to grace, I can say that in hindsight, it's 2020. Remember that? This was a long time ago, but I can look back on what happened with grace and say, in our waiting, it was not our finest hour. The church itself, after that first meeting, took off. It was thriving. We had a building. We had thriving ministries. We were well-known and respected inside of the community. I think at the height of all things, there were five services a weekend. We actually had to take over more space because we were like outgrowing the space that we were in. And it was a lot of space. Let's just say that. There was a lot happening inside of the life of the church. It was fantastic. But somewhere in there, there's a but, right? There's always a but. Because somewhere in there, we, I don't know, we started to lose some focus, maybe. Maybe we got a little too big for our britches. I'm not sure. But our leadership started, and this is my opinion here, but I felt like there was a place of leadership making decisions out of fear and not out of faith, which will guide a church and it will guide all of us in not the best path. And as we continue to have these decisions being made and things happening, we had turnovers in leadership. We had turnovers in staff. We had members that were, and they were members back then. We had members that were leaving. We had, and of course, as members leave, finances shrink. We still had all of this property and all of these bills to pay and money is not quite what it used to be. So there was a whole lot of fear that came into our world and we became so much more focused on our circumstances and how to fix our circumstances. We got to a point where we lost another senior pastor. We were drowning in debt. The staff, by this point in time, I'm on staff. The staff was mentally and physically and in some instances spiritually just exhausted from trying to hold it all together. And I promise you there were some Sundays that we just didn't know if we had it in us to do another Sunday. And that also was another Sunday not only physically, but did we have the money to have the lights on? And so as I look back on it now and I look back in these moments of the wait, right? We were waiting on God's plan for grace. We were waiting to see what God was calling us into because he had led us there. There is no doubt in my mind that we were right where we were supposed to be. But it also felt at this moment like he wasn't there anymore. And we acted like that. We acted like that out of that place of fear. But the thing is, thankfully, we serve a very faithful and loving God. He hadn't abandoned us to ourselves. And just if you check back into where Jairus is and this feeling like he's been abandoned. Lord, you brought me here. I don't know why we're still here. And while he's standing there, his worst fear is imagined. A messenger from his house arrives and he looks at Jairus and says, your daughter has died. And the next words out of his mouth are, basically, don't bother the teacher anymore. Because remember, he had come to Jesus to heal his child. Well, your child is now passed away. There's no healing needed. So release him, come home. And this is where I say, Jesus doesn't abandon us in those moments of our waiting in those moments of our worst fears ever. And I imagine what happened next. And this is how I pictured it, and you all may picture it different, but this is me, is that Jesus looked at Jairus and he took Jairus' face in his hands and he said to him, do not be afraid, just believe. And at that moment, I also read that and went, excuse me, that's easier said than done. But remember, Jairus has just witnessed this miraculous healing of this woman. He's just witnessed all that Jesus did after he physically healed her. And he came somehow knowing that Jesus could do something for him, right? So somewhere in his head, he knows that Jesus is his answer. And all Jesus says to him is choose me. That's all you have to do is choose me. Because you get to choose who you listen to. You get to choose if you listen to fear and doubt or if you listen to Jesus. It's your choice. It's our choice. And I promise you, every time I step up on this stage, I have to choose Jesus in order to drown out all the voices in my head. No judgment on that one, please. But there's a lot, there's a lot in my head that tells me, you know, things like you're not equipped. You don't have anything to say that these people want to hear. Who do you think you are that says that you can get up there and stand and speak? Like those are the voices. Those are the things that are in my head. But I have Jesus take my little face too. And he says, don't be afraid. Just believe. Choose me. And in this story with Jairus, that's exactly what he did. He didn't listen. He chose Jesus. They turned and they went to his house. And as in the end of the story, you can read it for yourself, but they go to his house and his daughter has died. But Jesus says, nah, she's asleep. Come on inside. Takes takes the parents in takes a couple of disciples and he grabs hold of the daughter's hands and he tells her to arise and to walk and guess what that's exactly what she did she stood up she walked Jairus came to Jesus to heal his daughter. And in the end though, his faith was tested. He was pushed into those extra hard places that said, you got to wait a minute to get your healing. You got to hold on with me and choose me. Don't listen to the other stuff because guess what? I've got you and I'm going to make this right. And lo and behold, by choosing Jesus, that's exactly what happened. Because if he had listened to the faith and his fear and his doubt, and he had just gone home, he would have lost his daughter. But instead, she's very much alive. So choose me. You come to this place where your worst fear is realized. And so somewhere right around 2016, 2017, Grace Community Church was at that place. We were at our worst moment. We had, yeah, we were in a bad place. Let's just put it that way. And I would say we were limping along, but, and I'm going to put the but in here, because again, there's a switch. What was left of Grace Community Church in 2017 was a core group of people who loved each other, who loved Jesus and who loved this little church. That's what was here still. And because of that and because of their want and desire, you begin to see us come out of the wait and you begin to see where, hey, Jesus has been with us the whole time, but where he starts to make his move. Because in 2017, I believe too, we had been pruned. We have our core group of people. We had surrendered it all. We were no longer the big cool church on the block. We were just this little peeled back tiny church who, mind you, was selling off stuff all the time. We were, that's where we were. We were in a bad place, but we gave it up. We quit trying to fix it. We quit being afraid all the time. And somewhere in there, something happened. We were gifted this building as much as we all have things to say about this building currently. In 2017, this building, oh, it was beautiful because it took our expenses and cut them dramatically. We could now focus on getting ourselves out of this horrible debt that we were in. Now, we still don't have a lead pastor at this point in time. And so our leadership teams, our elders are coming together saying it's probably time that we find somebody to lead this little pack of ragamuffins, for lack of a better word. And so the search begins. Now, the other thing just to mention is for an experienced lead pastor, we did not have a pretty resume and we didn't look really good. It's not someplace that they were just clawing to become a part of. So we had to step out in faith and take a chance. And that's what we did. Because remember, we're coming from a place of faith and not fear. And we hired a 36-year-old associate pastor who had zero experience leading a church. And his name is Nate, by the way. But the thing was, is that Jesus knew that Nate was the person for this church. And so he put him in place. And from that point in time on, we continued to walk this path of faith. You watched as our teams got healthier. You watched as we were no longer Grace Community Church and we became Grace Raleigh. We began to find our identity and who it was that God was calling us to be as a community, as a body, and then who we are to be to those around us in our community. You began to see the health. Our partners are all here and part of what it is that's happening inside of Grace. And guess what? These decisions are being made now. We have no more debt. We've actually purchased land. We've gone ahead and we've designed a future building. We have asked you as partners to come alongside us and where we believe that it is that God is leading us in our next step of obedience. And that's to build this building. And I stand before you today and I honestly believe that we as a church stand in our Jairus moment. That moment where God is looking at us and holding us by the face and saying, do not be afraid, just believe. This is the path that I have called Grace Community, Grace Community, sorry. This is the path I have called Grace Raleigh to take. Step out in faith with me. I've got you. And so I ask, what are you as the partners of grace believing for our sweet little church? Are you believing that our next step of obedience is to build this building? And if you truly believe that that is your next step of obedience, what are you doing to walk in it? And so as we close this morning, I will also say to you too, what fears do you have that keep you from all that God has for you? What is it that holds you back from realizing what it is that he has in store for you, the plan that he has as you take your next step of obedience? What do you need to lay at his feet? And what do you need to do to clear your brain, your mind of the fears and the doubts and choose him? Will you pray with me? Lord Jesus, thank you. Thank you for these examples of people who trust you, who love you, who choose you. Thank you for the example that they give us of doing it scared. Those next steps of obedience are not easy. The next steps of obedience are scary. But we know that you've got us. If you brought us here, you're going to walk with us through it. So thank you for loving us. Thank you for being faithful to us. And thank you for loving this little church that you call Grace Raleigh. And Lord, we love you. And it's in your name we pray. Amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here, and if I hadn't got a chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that. Thanks for coming on Time Change Sunday. I know that we're all, our wagons are dragging a little bit, but that's all right. Before I just launch into the sermon, I do have a bit of a retraction to print. Last week, I maliciously and falsely accused my wife, Jen, of smoking a cigar in college. We did not agree on the story, and that afternoon, she texted her friend Carla, her roommate, and I know Carla very well, and she asked her to confirm her side of the story, and Carla said, no, I was there. You pretended and gave it to me, and I'm the one that smoked it. It was a black and mild. It was disgusting. So I was wrong. Jen, as usual, was right. She's at home now with a sick kid. So anyways, if you see her, let her know that her character has been restored. One thing that is true that Jen and I do, and I bet that you've had the same conversation with your spouse if you have one of those or you're a good friend or something like that but I don't know about y'all but for us every time the a Powerball lottery gets up but like a ridiculous amount like 330 million dollars or something like that like so much it gets so big that your mom starts buying lottery tickets just in case it's God's will that she have that money to use it for his kingdom. You know, that's how we Christians justify the lottery ticket purchases. But every time we see that, when we'll see the billboard or mention it or something like that, then what conversation do we immediately have? Right, nodding heads. What would we do if we won the money, right? So then we get to have that fun conversation, and it goes, by now we've had it enough times that it goes in some very predictable ways. Out of the gates, you know, you have to sweep aside, get rid of the practicalities. Like, don't tell me how you're going to invest it. That's boring. Don't be a nerd. Like, what's the fun stuff you're going to do? What are the extravagances that you're going to allow yourself? And it always starts small with us because we're trying to be humble because we're trying to be humble people. We're not going to be ostentatious. But the one extravagance I always lead with, this one's consistent for me, is a private chef. I want a private chef to just live at my house and make me food all the time. That's what I would like. Jen will eventually admit that she wants to get a condo in Manhattan. And those are our extravagances. And then I'll be like, and maybe, you know, I mean, the car's got a lot of miles on it. So maybe I need a new car. Maybe you need a top of the line Honda Odyssey. You know. You guys know that's what I want. Maybe for travel, we should just buy into a private jet, like a share, not our own, but maybe we'll just share. We try to stay humble, and then as we have the conversation, it just gets more and more absurd until we're the Kardashians, so then you just laugh and whatever. But those are, that's fun to do. That's a fun game to play. What would life be like if? And then you imagine this life that maybe you would have one day, and I don't know what you guys would do if you hit it big, but it's fun to play that game of imagining what life could be like if. But one of the things that we all do, even if you're not ridiculous like Jen and I and daydream about what it would be like to win the Powerball, what I am convinced of is that every person in this room, every person who can hear my voice, does have plans and hopes and dreams for their life that are real, that are substantive, that actually matter to you because they're actually attainable. This is so ubiquitous in our culture that we have a name for it. It's the American dream. People move to this country in pursuit of what you have access to because we live in a place where we are allowed to dream our own dreams, we are allowed to make our own plans, and we are allowed to begin to pursue those. And so everybody here has hopes and plans and dreams for their life. And those are less funny. Because I'm probably never going to have a private chef. Probably not. I might be able to hire one for ad night to make me stay. I'm probably not going to ever have a private chef. I'm not going to mourn that. We'll probably never have a condo in Manhattan. I'm not going to mourn the loss of that potential condo, but I do have hopes and dreams in my life that if they don't come to fruition, I will mourn that. If I don't get to do Lily's wedding, that's going to make me sad. If I don't get to meet my grandchildren, that's going to make me sad. If I'm not still married to Jen in 30 years, that's going to make me sad. So we all have hopes and dreams that we marshal our resources around, that we pursue with our life, that we intend to execute. And some of us are less detailed than others. Like I've got a good friend in Chicago, and they were as meticulous as when they were first married before they had kids, they moved to Chicago and she had an opportunity to get her master's at Northwestern, get her MBA there, which is an expensive prospect. And they basically said, hey, if we do this, and we're going to borrow that money, then we are committed to both of us having full-time jobs and using our resources to pay for a nanny. That's just how our family is going to be. And they said okay, and they executed that plan and they've done that. And now they have three kids and a two bedroom condo in Chicago off of Lake Michigan. And their plan now is in 2026 or maybe 2027, they're going to move to the Atlanta suburbs to be closer to his family, to be closer to his mom. So they've got their plans mapped out like that. And maybe that's how you do your plans, and maybe it's not. But you all have them. You all have, if you have kids, you have hopes and dreams for your kids. It could be as minuscule as the kind of job you want them to have. It could be as broad as the kind of person that you want them to be. If you're married, you have hopes and dreams for that. If you have a career, you have hopes and dreams for that. But we all do this. As soon as we kind of come online somewhere in adolescence and realize that one day our life is going to be our own, we begin to imagine how we want to build it. Nobody in this space doesn't have plans and hopes and dreams for themselves, however broad or humble they might be. And I bring this up because the passage that we're looking at today in Mark chapter 8, if you have a Bible, you can turn to Mark chapter 8 verses 34 through 37 is where we're going to be focused. As we continue to move through Mark, we arrive this morning at one of the most challenging teachings in scripture. It's this incredibly high bar of demand that Jesus sets on our life. And it is one that we may not even be familiar with. It's one that I am certain that we don't consider enough, that we don't come back to enough, that we haven't wrestled with enough. It is one of the most impossibly high bars that Jesus sets in his ministry. And what we see in that bar is this, is that God has a dream for you, and it's better than yours. You have hopes and dreams for your life. You have things that you want to see come to fruition. Maybe you want to have a long marriage. Maybe you want to have a good career. Maybe you want to be a generous person. Maybe you want to be a good friend and a good member of the community. Maybe you want to see your kids flourish. These are all good things. Very few of you, if any, have terrible dreams for your life where you want to go do evil things. I'd like to be like Vladimir Putin. I don't think anybody's doing that. We all have good things that we want to see come to fruition. But here's what I'm telling you, and here's what I want you to begin to think about this morning. God has different plans for you, and they're better than yours. All right? With that preamble, let's look at, bless you, let's look at what Jesus has to say as he's teaching the crowds and the disciples, and let's look at what this high bar is for us. Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? Here's what Jesus says. He gathers the crowd around him. He gathers the disciples around him. And he says, if anybody wants to be my disciple, they must take up their cross and follow me. Now there's a lot about that statement that we need to understand. As kind of an aside to the flow of the sermon to where I want to go, I do want to stop here. And I want to look at that word that Jesus chose to use. Whoever wants to be my disciple must take up their cross and follow me. Whoever wants to be my disciple must do what I'm about to ask you to do. And one of the things that we've done in Christianity, in Christian culture and church world, is we've taken the terms Christian and disciple and we've made them mean two different things. We've said that a Christian is someone who's got their foot in the door. A Christian is someone who's going to go to heaven. They are saved. They are in right standing before God. They believe God is their father and Jesus is their savior. The way we talk about what it means to become a Christian at grace is to simply believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And once we believe those things, we are ushered into the kingdom of God as a Christian. And then at some point in our life, if we want to begin to take our faith very seriously, then we can become a black belt Christian, which is a disciple. Yeah? Like, Christianity is like discipleship light. We've separated those words. We've made them two different things. I'm a Christian. Are you a disciple of Christ? I don't know. That's pretty serious. Let's not get crazy. And listen, you know I'm right about that. And here's the thing. That is not how Jesus defined those terms. Jesus never used the word Christian. They were known as the followers of the way for years after his life. We made up Christian. Jesus called them disciples. And that's what he told the disciples to do. The end of his life, the great commission, go into all the world and make disciples. Right. Not Christians. Not converts. We think Christians are converts and disciples are people who take it seriously and try to make more converts. And to Jesus, he says, no. You are all the way in being a disciple of mine, following me, becoming more like me in character, doing the work that I do, becoming a kingdom builder, building the gospel, reaching people with the gospel. You are all the way in, or you're not following me. But we've made it possible to be a Christian who's not a disciple. And I just want to point out this morning, it's not the point of the sermon, but I just wanted to stop here and point out, that's not how Jesus defined it. So if in our heads we separate those terms, then we don't understand them the way that Jesus does. And we should have to decide if we think we're right or he's right. But he says, if you want to be my disciple, you must take up your cross and follow me. Meaning, you must take up your life, you must take up your sacrifice, you must take everything that you have and walk it to Calvary with me. And sacrifice your life with me for the sake of the gospel. The way we say it here is you must become a kingdom builder. Quit trying to build your own kingdom. Start getting on board with building God's kingdom by growing it in breadth and depth. He says, if you want to be my disciple, it's not about getting in the door and becoming a convert. It's about taking up your cross, taking up your life, taking up everything you thought you wanted, laying it down at the altar and following me and letting me do with your life what I would like to do with it. And he says it. It's very clear. It's explicit in the text. For the sake of the gospel. And he even uses the term, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it. But whoever loses their life for me will save it. Jim Elliott, famous missionary, I believe in the 40s and the 50s and the 1900s, died trying to reach some Ecuadorian tribal people who were cannibals. And he said, prior to that trip in his writings, that he is no fool who gives up that which he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose. It is absolutely in keeping with this teaching of Christ. If you call yourself my disciple, here's the tax. You give up your life. You give up, listen to me, you give up your hopes and your dreams and your plans. You give up the career you thought you wanted. You give up the goals for your children that you created. You give up who you thought you were going to be. You give up your finances and your time and your treasure. And you set those aside. And you go, Jesus, what would you have me do with these things? Are these the things that you want in my life? Or do you want now to choose a different life for me? But that's why I say that this is an incredibly high bar. Because he says, listen, if you want in, if you want in, let me tell you what the tax is. Let me tell you what it's going to cost you. It's so funny. When I was growing up, I used to hear this phrase all the time. Salvation's a free gift. Can't be earned, can't be deserved. And I'd always go like, yeah, but it does cost you something. Jesus tells you. It costs you your life. That American dream that you have, you've got to give that up. That's what Jesus is demanding. In fact, what we see from this text is Jesus insists that we trust his dream more than our own. Jesus in this text insists, you've got to trust my hopes and dreams and plans for your life more than you trust your own. That's the tax. You've got to give up your own. You've got to let me replace my vision for you for your vision for you, and you've got to go. And you've got to get to work sharing the gospel for the sake of the gospel. That's what he asks us to do. And this is a remarkably high bar, particularly for those of us who come into faith as adults, or even for those of us who begin to take our faith seriously as adults, because the toothpaste is out of the tube. We're already down the road. We got a mortgage. We got things that we're responsible for. We already have our life ordered, and so it's a really difficult thing to hand our life plans over to Jesus and go, if you want to change them, if you want me to do something else, if you want us to go somewhere else, to live somewhere else, if you want to change the way I raise my kids and what our values are, if you want to change the way I'm married, whatever you want to do, do it. I trust you. And in a sense, give up our plans for our future. That's a really tough ask. I sat with someone this week, a dear friend who in the last several years, her marriage has just become really, really bad. Just really awful and hard. And it's to a point now where it's very clear that the best thing for her and for her children are to not be in the house with him. Because that's not a good environment. And that's a really tough decision to make. And as I sat with her this week, she said, you know what? I'm not even really sad about him. I fell out of love with him years ago. But I'm grieving the life I thought I was going to have. And finally admitting that I'm not going to have it. She sat in the playroom and watched her children divide up the stuffed animals, deciding which ones were going to mommy's house and which ones were going to daddy's house. That was not her plan. That was not what she wanted to experience. When she walked down that aisle, her hopes and dreams and plans for her life were to be with him for the rest of their life, to see their grandkids and go on trips with them together. That was their hopes and dreams. And so now she's in the middle of mourning what she thought she was going to have. And so it's, I'm acknowledging, it's a big ask, midstream in life, to hand over everything that you had planned for yourself to Jesus. And so you do with this what you want. And if that causes you to mourn something you thought you wanted or you thought you needed or you had marshaled your resources around pursuing, then so be it. But Jesus says, go ahead and mourn. Get it over with. Because we've got work to do. And it's here that I want to say this. As we listen as adults and we try to process this and think through it and how to integrate it into our lives, what do we do with it if we want to apply the truth? As I mentioned a little bit ago, the reality of it is that the older you are, the more challenging this instruction becomes. Until you retire, then it's like, whatever you want, Jesus, I've got all the freedom. At least that's how I assume retirement is. I don't know. But the further down the road you are, the harder this gets to be obedient to. You know, I think about Zach and Haley over here. I just did their wedding in the fall. They don't look at them. They don't know anything about anything. They don't know nothing. But they're also at the cusp of life and can respond to this in a way that has more freedom than the way that others of us can respond to it. So we acknowledge that. Here's what else that implies because we have a lot of parents in the room who are still raising children. You can get ahead of this. You can get ahead of them creating their own hopes and dreams for themselves. You can start to raise them, reminding them all the time, God has plans for you. God made you on purpose. God's gifted you to do things in his kingdom. And it's my sacred duty as your parent to guide you to those. I remind you guys all the time of the verse in Ephesians, Ephesians 2.10. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. My most sacred duty, I believe, as a father, is to tell Lily and to tell John as often as they will listen, you are Christ's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, that you might walk in them. My sacred duty is to help you see those good works and walk in them. It sounds counterintuitive, especially for Americans. I don't want John and Lily to create their own dreams for their lives. I want their biggest dream for their life to be to walk with God. Hold me close and teach me to abide. We just sang it. I want their biggest goal for their life to be to abide in Christ. And that one day, when they get to heaven, to hear, well done, good and faithful servant. That's what I want for them. I'm really not very interested in them creating their own dreams. Because God has bigger ones for them that are better than theirs. And this makes sense, doesn't it? So I'll get there in a second. But to the parents, you raising your kids, you have a chance to get ahead of it now and to help them become young adults who know my life is not my own and God has plans for it and his plans are better than my plans so I'm going to follow them anyways. We can get ahead of this, guys, for the rest of us, as we try to integrate these things into our life. The problem is, that's exactly what we tend to do, isn't it? That's exactly what we tend to do. This isn't revolutionary information. It might be packaged in a way that we haven't thought about in a while, but it's not revolutionary information that Jesus asked for our life and wants us to live our life according to his plans. But when we hear that, trying to be good Christians who we don't yet know if we're disciples, we try to integrate Jesus' plans into the nooks and crannies of our plans, right? We try to take the life that we're already living and the path that we already chose. And then we try to work Jesus into those things so that being obedient to his word and choosing his dreams over ours doesn't cause very much pain. So we don't have to mourn a possible future. So we don't have to change a lot of things. So we don't get too uncomfortable. We just do a tiny little course correction and we feel better about ourselves because now we're giving Jesus this part of our life when that's not what he asks for. Take up your cross. Deny yourself. Follow me. If you give up your life for my sake, you will save it. If you don't, you will lose it. And here's the thing that I was thinking about as I was thinking through this. As we think about the idea of choosing our plans for our life or choosing Jesus' plans for our life. Your plans, I know this is a little whatever. So go with me or don't. But my hunch is your plans are just an amalgamation of who you were in childhood and who your parents were and who your friends were when you were in high school and college and you were developing your values. Your plans are just a hodgepodge of stuff that you receive from the people around you. If you had good parents, you wanted to be like them. If you had bad parents, you didn't want to be like them. And so that's at the correction of your life. If you had good friends in high school and college that had decent values, they pointed you in one direction. If you had bad friends, they pointed you in another direction. Very few of you ever sat down with a legal pad and research and wrote out a plan for your life in a thoughtful, meaningful way. Your plans are an accident, man. That's my point. Whatever you think you chose you wanted to intend, no, you didn't. No, you didn't. You stumbled into it by accident of birth and culture. But we cling so tightly to the plans and the dreams that we have for our life that were made by flawed, finite brains. When what Jesus is offering to us are plans that were made by a perfect, divine brain that sees everything all at once. And yet we still stubbornly and ignorantly choose our own. C.S. Lewis once said that the kingdom of God is like you're a child in your backyard. He said making mud pies, which I guess is what you did for fun in like the 1910s, is you're like, mom, I'm going to go play with mud. Okay, be safe. He said it's like being offered to go on a one-year holiday, on a one-year vacation around the world to see all the greatest sights in the world, and instead we choose to sit in the backyard and play with mud. Here's the thing about these plans that Jesus has for you, about his desire for you to spend your life building his kingdom, not your own. And here's why it's okay for him to ask him to give up everything you thought you wanted for what he wants, because they're better than yours. And Jesus is not a tyrant. He's not a dictator. He's not interested in making your life worse at all. In fact, we have verse after verse in Scripture that assures us that Jesus actually wants us to have a good life. One of my favorite verses that's in my office, I use it a lot, it brings me comfort a lot, is John 10.10. The thief comes only to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come, Christ says. I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Jesus wants you to, literally, he wants you to have the best life possible. Now here's the deal. He probably doesn't define best life like you currently do, but his definition is better than yours. A couple more, and then I'm going to make a point and we'll wrap up. David writes in two different places in Psalms. In one place he writes, better is one day in your courts than thousands elsewhere. And then in Psalm 1611 he says, at your right hand, God, there are pleasures forevermore. In your presence there is fullness of joy. Does this sound like a God who's interested in making you miserable? Does this sound like a God that doesn't have better plans for you than you do? Your plans are an accident. His are intentional and divine. Lastly, in Scripture, I often point out to you the Ephesians prayer, Ephesians 3, 14 through 19. We did a whole series on it last January. I pointed it out at the onset of this year. It's my prayer for grace and my prayer for you. And the heart of the prayer is that everything that happens in your life would conspire to bring you closer to God. That's the prayer. But I always stop when we go through it at 19 because you have to stop somewhere. But if you keep reading and you get to 20 and 21, you see one of the most amazing, encouraging little passages in scripture. It says this, it says, now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine according to his power that is at work within us. To him be the glory in the church and in Jesus Christ throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen. He finishes up that segment of the letter by offering the prayer to God, by him who is able to do immeasurably more than we could ask or imagine. I know it's a high bar for Jesus to set, to say, I want all of your hopes and dreams. I want all of your plans. I want you to sit down and prayerfully consider with your career if that's what I want you to be doing. Prayerfully consider with your finances, is that really how I want you to invest in those? Is that really the future that I have dictated to you, or is that what you want? Jesus asked that we sit down and we think through these very difficult things that the answers could potentially make us deeply uncomfortable. But here's what we know. He's going to hand you better plans. He's going to hand you better dreams. And here's what I know experientially. I would never ever pretend to be someone who's always living life according to Jesus' plan. I would never ever pretend to do that. And you may be thinking, you're a pastor. You've committed your life to Jesus' plan. Not really. I became a pastor because I wanted people to respect me and think I was cool. That's why I became a pastor. Just full disclosure, that came out in counseling like six years ago. I know that that's true. God has sanctified those motives. Now I don't care what you think. That's not true either. But God has sanctified those motives and helped me not do this for myself and for the sake of others. So I know what it is to not live according to God's plan. I know it very well. But I've been blessed in my life that there have been pockets where I did accept his plan over mine and I did live his plan for me rather than my own plans and I can tell you without reservation or hesitation or exception when I am living my life according to God's plan my life life is richer, fuller, better, more lovely, more wonderful, more alive. Without exception, my friendships get deeper. Without exception, my marriage is better. Without exception, I find it easier to get up and I'm more motivated to do the things that God has put in front of me that day. Without exception, I hold my children tighter. Without exception, I cry more happy tears and experience a fullness of life that never comes when I live by my plans. And I don't want to paint a falsely rosy picture here. You can live according to God's plans and experience pain. You can mess up and pursue your own plans that weren't God's plans, and as a result, you're in a ditch somewhere. As a result, your life got sidelined. As a result, you were in the middle of great pain and hardship. But make no mistake about it, that's probably not because you were ardently following God's plan for your life. It's probably because you're following your own and he's trying to get your attention. But those of you who have lived your life according to God's plans for even a season cannot deny that that season in your life was one of the best ones. And that those seasons are some of the best ones. And there will be pain in the midst of living according to God's plan. We do not judge the raindrops of tragedy because we're believers. But, on balance, if you invest your life following God's plan for you rather than your own, if you take up your cross and follow Jesus and give up your life for the sake of the kingdom, I promise you, you will live a better life if you do it. I promise you it will be more rich and more full and more lovely. I promise you it will be immeasurably more than you can ask or imagine for yourself. I promise you. So as we finish this simple thought, and then I'll pray. Jesus is asking for your life. Do you trust him with it? Do you trust him with it? Let's pray. Father, you are lovely and good and wonderful and we are grateful. God, it is a scary thing to hand our hopes and dreams over to anyone else outside of our control. But Father, I pray that we would trust you with ours. Help us trust you with our children, with our careers, with our financial goals, with our friendships, with all the things we want to accomplish, all the things we want to acquire, and all the things we want to accumulate, God. I pray that we would trust you with those things. Give us the strength and the courage to ask hard questions and to receive hard answers and replace our cruddy hopes and dreams with your incredible ones and help us be people who live our lives for you. In Jesus' name, amen.