We Are The Church: Part 3

We Are The Church: Part 3

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

Well, we are on our last week of our series for We Are The Church, and I'm really excited for what we're gonna talk about today but before we dive into that, I just wanna give you guys a reminder that at the beginning of this series, we talked about the Church Pulse Assessment that has been sent out to you through our email list and I believe there's even a text going out this afternoon as another reminder, but we would just really appreciate if all of you would take probably 10, 15 minutes to just go through that assessment. It'll help us as a leadership team to know where we can grow, what areas of weakness and strengths that we have, what you are looking for in your church body, but this is just something that we are going to have you go through, have everyone go through so that it will help us as we focus in on this next year. So if you would take some time to do that, we would really appreciate our goal is to get everyone to do that, so we would love for you to help us out with that.

We as a leadership team have a desire to see Spring Valley Church, really the global church, but specifically for us here at Spring Valley, for it to be your third place. Now, what is the third place? Well, in our culture, we often have three places. We have our home, we have our work, and then we have a third place, wherever you spend a lot of time. So for some people, maybe it's a coffee shop. I actually think Starbucks is the one who coined this term, who started this idea of a third place 'cause they wanted you to come be at their stores. But maybe it's a coffee shop or a bookstore. Maybe it is the library. Perhaps it's a really close friend's house or the home that you grew up in that your parents still live in. Wherever it is that if you're not at home or work or school, you are at this third place. And we just, we kind of have this dream or this vision that we would be your third place. Now, even if it's not the church building itself, although we have a lot of events and things here, obviously we hold our church services here, even if it's not here specifically, that the body, the people, our SVC family, wherever you may be gathering would be your third place. We hope that it's a place that when service is over, you stay and you talk, you linger. That's why we got the picnic tables outside. That's why we try to have an all-church meal regularly so we can stay after and fellowship and be with each other. Maybe it's this idea of when the check has been paid, maybe you've gone out to lunch after service or you meet up with some church friends on a Friday night, that after the check has been paid, you don't rush off, but you stay. And you continue to be together. We want it to be a place where we are in each other's business, we're in each other's lives regularly. That is our hope. And honestly, that's what a big part of what we're celebrating today, is the fact that people have chosen to make Spring Valley their church family or their third place. And we are so excited about what God is doing here. So we're gonna look more into that, about what that means for us individually and corporately as a church body.

There was a Harvard study done that said that one in three people believe the following. It says that, they said, "You have needs in your life "and no one to meet them. "You have hurts to share and no one to listen to them. "You have love to give and no one to receive it." So one of the 36 of Americans are enduring ongoing feelings of loneliness, isolation and longing to be loved and to love. 36%. Honestly, I would imagine that's actually kind of low, to some degree. 'Cause it's not God's design or His intention for His kids. That's not how He made us, to be enduring feelings of loneliness, isolation and wanting to love and be loved. We're actually on a pause from our Genesis series for this We Are the Church series, but I'm actually gonna take us to Genesis again. 'Cause I think it's a really good reminder of why we are built for community. So in Genesis one, God, we see creation. God made order out of chaos and He created the world. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and He said, "It is good." Let there be light, light was good. Stars, planets, fish, plants, birds, animals. All of it, He said, was good. But then God said something wasn't good. After He made man, made Adam, and He saw that Adam had no one to do life with, had no one to laugh with or cry with or spend time with or share experiences with, He said, "This isn't good." Genesis 2:18 says, "The Lord God said, 'It is not good "'for the man to be alone. "'I will make a helper suitable for him.’"

And then moving on to 22, "Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib "He had taken out of the man "and He brought her to the man. "The man said, 'This is now bone of my bones "'and flesh of my flesh. "'She shall be called woman "'for she was taken out of the man.'" It wasn't good for him to be alone. God designed them to be together, to be in community. We know this because of what we've also talked about in our Genesis series of what came before man was made. What did God say before He made humans? Genesis 1:26, "Then God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness. "Let us make them in our image." That's plural language. So we see that the Trinity exists in community. We have Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. There's this perfect community that exists, distinct persons, but united as one. Now, God didn't create us because He was lonely. We see that because He was in community. He wasn't lonely and God doesn't need anything. So He didn't create us because He was lonely. He created us because He is love. Love isn't what God did, it's who He is. And He wanted to make us, to be in relationship with us. That's where we get the greatest commandment. Matthew 22, Jesus says, "The greatest commandment "is to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, strength, "and love your neighbor as yourself." So out of His love, He created us and then He gave us each other so that we can love Him and love each other. We were made for community.

The early church that we see in the book of Acts is really embraced this idea. They understood it. They knew that they needed each other. If you'll turn with me to Acts 2 in your Bibles or your phones, we'll also have it up on the screen. Acts 2:46-47, we see this picture of the early church embracing their community. It says, "They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching "and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread, "and to prayer. "Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs "performed by the apostles. "All the believers were together "and had everything in common. "They sold property and possessions to give "to anyone who had need." Verse 46, "Every day they continued to meet together "in the temple courts. "They broke bread in their homes and ate together "with glad and sincere hearts, praising God "and enjoying the favor of all the people. "And the Lord added to their number daily "those who were being saved." Every day they were together. They met together, they spent time together, they made food together, they ate and did life, they took care of each other. It was more than just physical proximity, although that was very important, but it created a spiritual intimacy and an emotional unity.

Why did they gather so often? Well, they needed each other and they knew they needed each other. They were aware of it, so they did something about it. Many believers, all believers, need that community too, but I think, especially in our modern day, we've forgotten it. We have forgotten how much we need each other. Maybe we have our immediate family, maybe we have our best friend or our spouse, but then beyond that, we forget that we need other people. A lot of us have embraced this, an isolating existence, maybe not even intentionally, but with the way of technology and advancement in conveniences, we work and shop and play online. We have social media that's not actually that social. We think it is, we pretend it is. And don't get me wrong, you can make real, I have made friendships with people online, but it's different, it's different when you are in person. We watch sermons, we listen to podcasts, we listen to audiobooks, all online. We think we don't need anything else, we don't need to go out or be with people. These are not bad things, please hear me on that. I do all of those things myself, these are not bad things. But I think we've lost the thread when it comes to truly living in community with other people, of seeing others and being seen by them. You can't do that when you're alone, you can't do that when you're just behind a screen, you can't do that when you're choosing to live in isolation. The reality is that as we all know, relationships can be messy. It can be scary to be vulnerable, to open ourselves up to people, to risk being hurt, 'cause we're all imperfect, we're all gonna mess up. And honestly, I think sometimes it's just inconvenient. We have work, we have our homes, we have our families, we have things we've gotta do, and so to put those on pause, to go be with other people can be really inconvenient, or even to invite people into that can be really inconvenient. So we don't, or we limit it. But see, being with each other is so good for us. It's good for our mental health, as science shows. It is good for the joy of our lives, it adds so much joy. It provides opportunity for encouragement and accountability. It helps breathe spiritual growth like nothing else does. You need each other, we need each other. Acts says that they met together daily, in person, in their homes, they went to each other's houses. They were all up in each other's business. They saw each other parenting, they saw their marriages, they saw what happens when they were stressed. And the thing with those kinds of relationships and that kind of community, it doesn't stay at surface level for very long, it can't. When you see who someone is when they are stressed out, you know who they are. I mean, if you think about what do we do when we have a loved one or someone we care about that suffers a tragedy or a loss? Maybe we send a text, hey, thinking about you, praying for you, let me know how I can help. Maybe we send flowers or drop off a meal on their porch. These are all good things, don't stop those things, do those things. But may I encourage you to pick up the phone. I think I'm probably more talking to my generation and younger, we have like an allergy to phone calls. Right, pick up the phone, let them hear your voice. Or, and hang with me here, go to them. Go be with them. Show up on their porch with a hot pizza and a hug and you are just ready to practice the ministry of presence. You are just there for them. You're a hand to hold, a shoulder to cry in, you don't have to say anything.

Sometimes people just wanna know that they are seen and they are known and they're not alone. I think sometimes we don't feel like we've maybe built up the relational equity needed to do that, needed to step into someone's space or to invite them into ours. But do you know where that relational equity is built? In regular, intentional community. When we are intentional about being with each other, it builds that relational equity so that we can show up for each other. Having Christian community, being the church, having this be your third place will not happen by accident. It has to be done intentionally. But when it is, it's what combats the loneliness. It's what fights against the things we talked about earlier from the Harvard study. It says, it's gonna provide someone who can help you meet your needs. It's going to give you someone whom you can share your hurt with, who will listen to you and pray for you. It's gonna give you someone to love and who will love you. When we commit to being in relationship with others, it combats the loneliness, it pushes it back in our own lives, but also in the lives of others. When we are committing to Christian community, we're creating the opportunity for ourselves to be in community, but also for others. What if, at least to some extent, God is asking you to live in Christian community, not for yourself, but for someone else? Maybe you're one of the two out of three that isn't struggling with loneliness or isolation right now. You still need community because other people need you. Someone else may need you to be there, to show up. And I promise you, one day, you're gonna be on the receiving end of that, but you have to be engaged consistently and intentionally in the body of Christ.

Our leadership team here has worked really hard to try to create some of these spaces and places for you to come and be a part of that. Our monthly men's and women's events, the guys just had an awesome time at ax throwing on Friday night. Yeah, I heard it was so much fun. Ladies, should we go ax throwing, maybe? No, okay. I'm just saying, the guys had so much fun. Well, we have our men's and women's events, we have our weekly Bible studies, we have youth on Monday nights for our students, family fun night we got coming up on Friday, and we want to create more. We're working to gather more opportunities for us to come together in addition to our Sunday morning. But we do this because like the early church, we know that we need each other. But here's where I might step on some toes. We can provide the place, but you have to choose it. You have to prioritize it. Just like we often choose things that cause us to live in isolation, sometimes we choose things that prevent us from engaging in that Christian community, from being there when we know we should be. And sometimes it's as simple as we over schedule. We say yes to too many things, not necessarily bad things, but we just say yes to too many things. Maybe we have all the kids' extracurricular activities or sports, maybe we take all the overtime shifts that we can. Maybe we just are hiding. Instead of opening ourselves up to other people, we would rather hide. We'd rather stay isolated. We'd rather protect ourselves. We don't want to be inconvenienced. 'Cause it is, it can be inconvenient. But it is so vital to our Christian life, to our spiritual growth and to our walk with Christ to do so alongside other believers. That is why we gather. The early church knew that and we can model our life after that. So what do we want our Christian community to be like? Well, I think there's many things, but we're gonna look at four things that we want our Christian community here at Spring Valley Church, your third place to be.

Number one, we want it to be full of grace. Acts 20:32, Paul is talking to the believers in the church and he says, "Now I commit you to God "and to the word of His grace, which can build you up "and give you an inheritance among all those "who are sanctified." We are given God's grace for the purpose of our sanctification, which means we are just being more, made more and more like Jesus. But because we have been given His grace, we can extend that grace to other people. So when someone walks in, it is not a place of judgment. Everyone is welcome. Come as you are. Jesus called people to Him. He didn't say, "Go clean yourself up first." He said, "Come follow me." So just like we have been given so much grace, we live in that grace and we extend that grace to other people. So we want our community to be a place that is full of grace. And all of these things require your participation. I can say these things all day long, but all of us have to embrace these practices so that we are all participating in this community, in this way. So we gotta be full of grace.

Number two, we want our community to be a place of healing. I read a pastor's quote this week. He says, "Confess to God for forgiveness. "Confess to people for healing." Now, we can be healed. God is the one who does the healing. But there is something supernatural that happens when we confess to someone else. James 5:16 says, "Therefore, confess your sins "to each other and pray for each other "so that you may be healed. "The prayer of a righteous person "is powerful and effective." I've said it before and I'll say it again, revival will not happen without confession and repentance. We cannot have revival in our own hearts or in our church until we confess and repent and turn away from what breaks the heart of God. Now, confessing often just means confessing your sin, admitting the sin you've had. You take it to God and you ask for forgiveness. But when I talk about confessing to other people, I'm talking about sharing that with someone, expressing that struggle to them so they can pray for you, so they can hold you accountable, so that they can be there for you. But it can also mean confessing something else that you are going through. Maybe it is a struggle, maybe it is a past hurt or trauma that you've never shared with anyone and you can't experience healing because it is keeping you in bondage 'cause you've never told anyone. When we practice confession with other people, when we surround ourselves with people that will pray for us and will intercede for us on our behalf, we experience freedom from bondage. Chains are broken, supernatural and spiritual healing comes through confession. So we wanna be a place of healing.

Number three, we wanna be unified in our mission. We wanna be on the same page when it comes to what we are called to as a body. Acts 2, again, 46 through 47 says, "Every day they continue to meet together "in the temple courts. "They broke bread in their homes "and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, "praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people "and all the Lord added to their number daily, "those who were being saved." Our mission is to spread the gospel. That's our number one goal, is to point people to Jesus and make heaven crowded. We want to see our community saturated with the glory of God. That's our mission, is to be filled up here and then go out and overflow to the world. When we are operating in community regularly, we become more unified in that mission. Are we adding to our number daily, those who are being saved? No, but we are growing. And again, that's something we're gonna celebrate this afternoon. That we are seeing numbers being added to us daily. And we don't celebrate them just for the sake of bigger numbers and seeing those numbers grow. We are celebrating souls that were lost that have now been found. Lives that have been surrendered to Christ. People that have joined our Christian community and chosen to be part of our Spring Valley family. That is what we are celebrating. But again, it's because we meet together regularly that we build up the body, that we become clear in our mission. That we're in it together, that we're stronger together and that it builds our faith and it builds our relationships so that we can be more effective for His kingdom.

Number four, it is where we become battle ready. Our time and community makes us ready for the spiritual battles that we face every day. In the church in America, I think we really downplay the spirit realm, spiritual warfare. And I think part of it is we're afraid of sounding a little crazy or even of running the risk of over spiritualizing things. But at the risk of over spiritualizing it, I'm gonna tell you there is a spiritual battle. We all face those battles. And so when we come together, it is an equipping of the saints. It is getting us battle ready for when we go out and we face those spiritual battles. The Bible says we don't fight against flesh and blood, but against powers and authorities and principalities of the dark world. We're not gonna be very good at fighting spiritual battles if we have not become ready, if we have not armored up and been prepared. So we come together and we're equipped through worship, through the teaching of God's word, through fellowship. Proverbs 27:17 says, "As iron sharpens iron, "so one person sharpens another." You can't sharpen something without contact. It has to come into contact in order to be sharpened. But when it's sharp, we become dangerous to the enemy. Through community, we are given the tools we need to combat, to combat the enemy, to combat in spiritual warfare, and we are just stronger in numbers.

Paul talks about this in Ephesians when he tells us to put on the full armor of God. When he's writing this, he's referring to the Roman soldier's armor. And he talks about the shield of faith, that that is the main form of protection. And the Roman soldiers would have a giant shield that would, basically big enough to hide behind. But when the enemy was sending flaming arrows arcing over into their territory, they would circle up and lift up their shields to create a shell. So not only was it protecting them, it was protecting their fellow soldier. So when we become battle ready, not only is it going to help us and prepare us to fight a spiritual battle, it's gonna protect our brothers and sisters. We have a couple guys in our church who are ex-military, and they have tattoos that say I-G-Y-6 And I asked them about it. I said, "What does I-G-Y -6 stand for?" And they said, "I got your six." Meaning, I've got your back. Paul talks a lot about soldiers and being ready and armoring up and military language. So just like our men and women in uniform, we as the body of believers, we have each other's backs. We can say that because we are operating in community, I got your six, I've got your back. But we can't do that if we don't know each other, if we aren't spending time together, if we aren't with each other.

When we live life together and have real conversations, when we open ourselves up to vulnerability, when we get equipped, we're gonna be more prepared to defend against the devil schemes. Friends, there's a lot of darkness in this world. We are not ignorant to that. We've seen that time and time again. More school shootings than I'd like to count. Oh, immigrant woman being brutally murdered on public transportation. Charlie Kirk being assassinated over and over. There are stories of terrible things. Evil is rampant in our world. But I'm here to tell you that the church of Jesus Christ is alive and well. But we have to get ready. When we are full of grace, when we are a place of confession that leads to healing, when we are unified in our mission, in our battle ready, we will together be able to push back that darkness. We'll be able to stand firm with clarity and courage against the lies of the enemy. We can push back against tribalism and division. Then we get to offer peace to the world, the peace of Christ. We get to be the peace bearers that go out and point people to Jesus. Our loneliness will be our downfall. Our isolation from each other will be our downfall. But Matthew 18:20 says, for where two or three gather in the name of the Lord, He will be there with us. So maybe loneliness and isolation will be our downfall, but victory through Jesus will happen and be found in community. So we are the church. Who's ready to commit to being a part of the body of Christ, to be the hands and feet of Jesus. Sign me up for that. Sign me up for that.

Let's pray. Jesus, we thank you that you made us for community, that you made us for relationships, that you put us together so that we can make each other better, so that we could sharpen each other, so that we wouldn't be lonely or trying to do this life in isolation. God, thank you for our church family. Thank you for this place that we can call our church home, that we can come together and fellowship with each other, that we can be with each other in the lows and celebrate in the highs. We praise you for designing us this way, for knowing that we would need each other. Help us to lean into that. Help us to be vulnerable. Help us to be open. Help us to be committed to where you have placed us in the body of Christ. We praise you. We thank you. We love you. In Jesus' name, Amen.

We Are The Church: Part 2

We Are The Church: Part 2

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

Well, my name is Andrei, I'm one of the pastors here and we're glad that we're all together this Sunday. We are taking a break, as was said, from our Genesis series. We're doing the We Are The Church series. I want to remind you that we sent out an assessment, a church assessment via text, via email this past week and many of you have taken it, we really appreciate that. If you haven't yet, don't you worry, you're getting another text and another email and another opportunity to take that church assessment. And again, it's all to help us as a church and our leadership to understand where we're at and to move forward with the best steps possible. So if you could take some time this week, if you haven't yet, to take that church assessment, we would really appreciate that.

Last week, Pastor Chris started off our series, We Are The Church, and he had three mindsets for us, to be more devoted, to be more generous, and to share the love of Jesus, which we're going to talk about more today. But he ended with the encouragement to change the object of our devotion by taking one step. And he said maybe that is to begin tithing or to increase your tithing, to begin volunteering at church, to pray daily, and whatever that step was for you, I pray that God has been stirring within you clarity over what the step is to take and that you guys are taking those steps every day and these weeks ahead. So we are excited about what this series is going to mean for us individually and us as a church.

Today we're going to be talking about a question, why are we the church? Why are we the church? And while the verbiage may be different from every church that you go to generally, there are two things that are hidden in every kind of mission statement or vision statement for a church, and that is to bring glory to God and to bring people to Jesus. So those two things, to bring glory to God, to bring people to Jesus, this is why the church exists. We say it, it's on our wall here at Spring Valley, to see our community saturated with the glory of God through making disciples in the everyday stuff of life. So you can see in there we're trying to bring glory to God, and we're also trying to bring people to Jesus. Sometimes that can go from the forefront of our minds to the back, and we tend to forget why we are the church, why we're Christians and what our purpose is and why we gather together, even when it is a huge font on the side of our sanctuary. Sometimes we forget.

This reminds me of a story. When I was a pastor at a former church at East Parkway, there was a group. As I was pastoring, the group started coming to church, and it was eight to ten people, and they all came in this big van, this big 12-passenger van, and they were people who were in recovery or homeless, and they all came from a shelter up the road. They came from a long ways away, men and women, all dealing with, again, some point in their recovery, and they would drive over an hour to be here because someone, the person who was bringing them, had gone through recovery and seen the importance of church. They had a family member that went to that church, and so he was like, "Hey, I'm going to church now, and I think all these other people should also go to church." In order to be on time, I can give you the setting here, they would get there really early because they were driving far away, and so they'd often just be there in the parking lot for more than a half hour just chilling. For those who didn't know their story, it kind of looked a little odd. There's a group of 10 or 11 people, eight to ten, whatever, people sitting in the parking lot, smoking a lot of cigarettes, and not looking maybe like everyone else at the church. They were dressed in their best, but sometimes you go to a certain church setting, and there's just like, "Oh, well, we all look like this, and these people don't look like that." And again, it was a little off-putting for those who didn't know the story of why is there a group loitering in the parking lot and just smoking away, and then they come and they take all our brownies and cookies in the morning, and they keep drinking all the coffee. But for those who did know, it always put a smile on our faces to see that they were there. Why? Because we knew that this is why the church existed, to bring glory to God and to bring people to Jesus, and the person driving those people was bringing people to the house of God to go to church on Sundays. And as their story kind of came out over Sundays after Sundays, and people were asking, "Who are they? Who are they?" And then eventually the whole church knew, and the whole church, even if they didn't at first understand and see, but they were coming as they were, just love them as they were, and so the church had to learn to do the same.

And today we're going to be in a passage in Scripture where Jesus accepts someone just as they are, and the example that it is to us of why the church is the church. And so we're going to be in Mark 2. If you have your Bibles, you can follow along on the screen or on your phone. So we're going to be in Mark 2, and just to give a little background, Jesus has returned to home base, Capernaum, and he's teaching in a home, and there's no room left. As you can imagine, Jesus has quite the following, and when he comes into town, people want to hear, and so he comes to this house, and it is packed. It's like if Jesus showed up to one of your life groups, and you'd just be texting, like, "Hey, he's here, and you should get here," and your house was full. And this group at this house has got some pretty important people. You got everyone from the next-door neighbors to religious leaders who showed up to hear Jesus talk. From our passage, I want us to see the types of people that we see in this story and remind us that it's the very same types of people that we see in church today. So I'm going to pray, and then we're going to read. If you guys could bow your heads one more time with me. God, thank you for the chance to gather. We do not ever want to take this for granted. We can gather on a Sunday freely and worship you and hear your truth be preached. God, we pray for this message that you have prepared. I pray that it would reach our hearts, that it would draw us closer to you, that it would encourage us to give you everything we have and to live for you every moment of every day. And God, I pray that as we have a deeper understanding of who you are, we would have a deeper understanding of who we are and why we as a church exist. So be with us this morning. We give this time to you. We pray this in your name. Amen. All right. Let me go ahead and read our passage, starting in verse 1, Mark 2. A few days later, when Jesus again entered Capernaum, the people heard that he had come home. They gathered in such large numbers that there was no room left, not even outside the door, and he preached the word to them. Some men came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them. Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus by digging through it and then lowered the mat the man was lying on. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, "Son, your sins are forgiven." Now some teachers of the law were sitting there thinking to themselves, "Why does this fellow talk like that? He's blaspheming. Who can forgive sins but God alone?" Immediately, Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking in their hearts, and he said to them, "Why are you thinking these things? Which is easier, to say to this paralyzed man, 'Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, 'Get up, take your mat, and walk?' But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins." So he said to the man, "I tell you, get up, take your mat, and go home." He got up, took his mat, walked out in full view of them all. This amazed everyone, and they praised God, saying, "We have never seen anything like this.”

Another pastor, Pastor Greg Crochell, has some helpful insights into this passage, and I want to share some of those this morning. So we are going to look at five different types of people. In every church, you see five different types of people. The first is, you walk into a church, every church, you see someone in need. In our passage, it's the paralytic, in need of healing. Obviously, he has his friends there, but he needs something. He is living a life where he is not whole physically. And for that culture at that time, someone who was paralyzed, it was often associated with a generational sin. His parents must have done something, that he is now living a life like this. We won't get into all that right now, but this man is in need of physical healing. Today that could be in our church, someone battling depression, dealing with financial struggles, a single parent, someone feeling alone and hopeless, fighting anxiety. You come to church, and you are in need. There are people in our church today who are in need, in this room, who are in need. Sometimes that's us. We walk in, and we just need Jesus, and we need those other Christians in our lives. Other times, you go to church, and you're in a good place, you're experiencing a good season, God's blessing you, and you're able to think outside of yourselves, and you're aware of the needs around you, and that brings up our second person.

In every church, you will find someone who cares. In our passage, we see the four friends of this paralyzed man, who took it upon themselves to bring the man before Jesus. And they don't just stop once the house is filled. They didn't take him there like, "Hey, look, we couldn't get through. So sorry. Maybe we can meet Jesus next time, next week, at the Life Group, at this house." They care, they cared enough to keep going, determined to find a way to bring their friend to Jesus. Come back to that in a second. Today, in our church, there are people who care deeply for others, who have the capacity to care deeply. They are mindful of the lives that we are living, and people in need, and they want to do something about it. And maybe that's as simple as connecting with a person, sending them a text, "Hey, I know I was talking to this person on Sunday. I know they're going through a hard time. I'm going to reach out this week and just let them know that they're not alone. I'm thinking of them. I'm praying for them." Maybe that's meeting up for coffee and saying, "Hey, I know that they have a hard time getting out of the house. I'm going to go invite them to coffee. We're going to spend some time together." Maybe it's providing meals. Someone who's, "Hey, meal prepping is the thing that is very difficult right now. We're going to provide some meals for that person." Or maybe it's someone that we all cringe at, helping someone move. A classic, classic church help. And it's still good. We should all do it. We should help people move. It's a tough one. Maybe it's giving some money to someone who is in need and say, "Hey, I'm having a hard time this month. I'm doing my best, but it's just things aren't there." And there's someone who has the means to provide help. Whatever the need is, there are people in church who care. And I know, and I know that you guys know, I want to encourage us, there are people at Spring Valley who care, who have the capacity to care.

So you see, in church, you see someone in need, you see someone who cares, you also see someone who is preoccupied. In our passage, there's a whole house full of people, wall to wall, so full that four people could not get through. They had to dig a hole in the roof. I want to show, do we have the picture? There's a picture of a house. Can we put that up there? This is what they would have, something like this would have been what they were working with. So there's a kind of a courtyard, that was all full, just imagine that whole place packed with people. And the roof was made of some wooden beams, some straw and clay manure mixture, and then when it rained or if there was water put on top, that clay would kind of seal and harden. And so when it said they had to dig through the roof, they literally had to dig through some very hard materials to get through. And there was also like grass up there and people would work up there and just relax up there maybe after, I don't know. But there's, you could walk up on that roof, it was very strong. And so it was not a small thing to say, hey, we're just going to like put apart some straw. It was no, it was a whole material that they had to dig through. That's how committed these friends were, to get through all of that. And the friends could not get through that house. It was so packed. Even with, I imagine they were whispering, hey, we have someone here who needs to see Jesus. They're not just like, hey, we just want to go to the front. There's like, hey, we got something going on. Can we get through? And no one will let them through. They were all preoccupied. They had their backs turned to the person in need. I like how Pastor Craig says it in regards to how it can look today. It says there can be Christian circles that love Jesus. They have their Christian bumper stickers. They have their Christian language. They say, praise the Lord, hallelujah. They listen to KLOVE radio. They have their favorite podcast. And without knowing it, and without meaning it, just because they were preoccupied, their body language, their posture essentially says to people around them, you can go to hell as far as we're concerned, because we're doing our Jesus thing. They didn't mean to, but they can just have their little Christian thing going on, and it's a good thing. They all liked each other, but they didn't realize they were preoccupied and had their backs turned to someone who was in need. Are we too preoccupied that we don't see people in need? We all have our own needs. We're not denying that. But there's also, we need to be aware of the people that are sitting around us in this room that we encounter outside these walls in our lives that are needing Jesus. And even something good, like our own personal walk with God, should not deter us from lifting up our heads and saying, "Who's around me right now that may be needing Jesus? And can I participate in them seeing Jesus, meeting Jesus, hearing Jesus?" Those four friends, they didn't give up. They didn't let those circumstances stop them from getting their friend to Jesus. That's the kind of attitude and heart and action that we need to have as a church, willing to do anything short of sin to reach people who don't know Christ. Pastor Craig says to reach people no one is reaching, we'll have to do things no one is doing. Let's sink in for a second.

To reach people that no one is reaching, we might have to do some things that no one else is doing, to have the conversations that no one else is having, to go take the time and sacrifice our time to go spend it when no one else is doing it. The friends of the paralytic do that. They say, "You know what? We can dig a hole through the roof. No bad ideas. We are determined to get this man to Jesus. How are we going to do it? We're going to go up to the roof, we're going to dig a hole, we're going to lower our friend down to Jesus." Imagine the scene inside. You're sitting there, probably standing there, standing room only, shoulder to shoulder, trying to hear Jesus. All of a sudden, some dirt starts falling down from the roof. What is going on up there? And then a man, this gaping hole opens up, and there's a man being lowered down in front of Jesus. And I imagine Jesus with the biggest smile on his face as he sees what's happening. I think we know that Mark 2:5, it says, "When Jesus saw their faith," saw their faith. For those friends, faith wasn't just an internal belief. It was a strong enough belief that it led them to action. You ever know someone that had such a strong faith you could see it in their lives? I know I have. I've said this to people. I can see their faith in the way they serve. I can see their faith in the way they pray. I can see their faith in the way they love people who are really hard to love. I can see that person's faith in the way they give. I can see a person's faith in the way they have compassion with people. I can see a person's faith in the way they love, in the way they talk to their children as a parent. I can see a person's faith when they're talking with people who they disagree with, and they are loving them like Jesus. People can see the way, they can see our faith in the way that we live. And in moments throughout life when we are choosing to be like Jesus, those four friends had a faith that you could see. And Jesus says, "When I saw their faith, something amazing happened." I imagine the paralyzed man through all of this hoping and praying for physical healing. That's why he's there. His friends, that's why they're bringing him there for physical healing. I no longer want to be paralyzed. I want to walk. I want to be whole. And yet Jesus didn't just give him healing. In fact, he does something else first. Even though the man brought the paralytic to be healed, Jesus sees a need that is more important because Jesus can do that. He can see what we want but knows exactly what we need. Pastor Craig says it this way, "Sometimes God gives us what we need before he gives us what we want." The man is lowered down. It's probably clear what the situation is that he cannot walk. And before healing him, the first thing that Jesus says to him, "Son, your sins are forgiven." Sometimes God gives us what we need before he gives us what we want. The man wanted his body to be healed, but Jesus knew that his heart needed to be forgiven. Praise God that he can see what we truly need, not just what we want. And it's at this point though, there were some people in the house have issue with what's happening. And maybe it started with they got dirt in their face and they're a little upset by that. But definitely the healing of someone and claiming to be God, forgiving sins, is where some people got really upset.

And that brings us to the fourth type of person that we see in every church. It's the uncomfortable one. Brace yourselves. Someone who is critical. I don't mean like vitally important. I mean someone who is always critiquing what is happening in the church. Verses 6 through 7 say, "Now some teachers of the law were sitting there thinking to themselves, 'Why does this fellow talk like that? He's blaspheming. Who can forgive sins but God alone?'" They're saying, "Jesus, you can't do this. That's not how this is going to happen. It's not how this is done." In churches today, there can be...that is present. There can be a lot of that. Someone who is critical, someone who is unhappy with things in church that aren't aligned with their preferences. They might not call them preferences. People who never seem to say anything positive, only negative, and complain and choose to see things through a critical lens. People who choose to ignore the work of Jesus that is happening in a church and instead make it about themselves and how they think, "This is not how I would do it," which means this is not how it should be done. But Jesus doesn't stop for the critics. Verse 10 says, "But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins. So he said to the man, 'I tell you, get up, take your mat, and go home.'" Take up your mat and go. You don't need it anymore. Jesus continues his work. And he might be saying today, "Maybe not take up your mat, but hey, leave your struggles here. Leave that financial struggle behind. Leave that anxiety here. Let go of your bad habits. Leave behind the shame. Go and follow me in your day-to-day life." That's what the paralytic did. Who's no longer a paralytic, a healed man. He gets up, healed by the power of Jesus, walks out in full view of all of them, and everyone's amazed. They've never seen anything like it before. This man's life was changed when he encountered Jesus, both internally and outwardly. And his physical, his body was healed, but his heart was forgiven. His sins were forgiven.

So, we'll see. In every church, someone in need, someone who cares, we have them all listed up here, someone who is preoccupied, and someone who is critical. Which one are you? Take a moment here. Look at that list. Assess your heart, where you're at in life. Maybe you're more than one. That's possible too. Maybe you go through different seasons, and so at one season you were this, but now you're in a season where, hey, now I'm this person. You might be someone in need. And if that's you, if you've said, hey, I'm the person in need, then this is the perfect place to be. You're exactly where you need to be, because in every church is someone who cares about your need. You are around people who care about what you're going through. Unfortunately, there are also those of us who are preoccupied. I've been there before. We put our heads down. We go to church. We say, hi, hey, hey, nice to see you, great, great. We go on with our day. We go on with our week. Yeah, I've got to go to church. And we're just going through the motions. We're in a rut. We're not bringing people to Jesus. We're kind of doing our own thing. We might have our backs turned to the people in our lives who need Jesus. And we may need Jesus to help us a bit more, to enable us to be considerate and caring to the people around us. Maybe there are those of us who are critical. Maybe we woke up on the wrong side of the bed one Sunday. Or maybe we need a good look at our heart, at what's going on inside of us. We need to ask Jesus, why am I thinking these things? Why am I saying these things? Which one are you? Someone in need, someone who cares, someone who's preoccupied, or someone who is critical? There's actually one more type. I said five types of people in every church. The last one is this. We in every church, we are all someone who can be changed. We are all someone who can be changed by the grace of God. All of us, every single one of us in this room, changed by the grace of Jesus. When you walk into a church, whether this church or you've been visiting other churches, you've been to other churches, when you walk into a church, who do you see all around you? But people who can be changed by God. Scripture tells us that if anyone, it doesn't matter who or what you've done, if anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation. The old is gone and everything is being made new. If you are in Christ, you have freedom. Says he who the Son sets free is free indeed. We don't come here as perfect people. We don't come here as a social event. We don't come here to top off our spiritual tanks and be like, "I was just missing a little and now I'm back to being perfect again. I'm good to go out throughout my week." It's not how this works. We come here, whether you've known Jesus all your life or you just accepted him yesterday, we are all in need of Jesus and the life that he gives us and the grace that he bestows on us. We are all someone who can be changed by Jesus.

Now let me shift gears here. Who do we not see at church and who do we not see in this passage? Sounds tricky, but it's really simple, I promise. We don't see the people who aren't there. Gotcha. See, you see what I did there? We don't see the people who aren't there. Maybe in today's circumstances, maybe it's the woman who almost went but was too afraid because she had so much going on in her life and she was afraid that if anyone were to find out anything, that shame would keep her from making connections and being a part of that church. Maybe it's the guy who was interested but didn't want to miss the Sunday morning football games. I was just like, "Hey, no one's really invited me. I kind of thought about it, but I don't want to go." Maybe it's someone who before COVID was interested in going to church and then COVID happened and afterwards they never re-sparked that interest of going to church and no one's talked to them about going back to church. The list goes on and on and on about people and why they're not here. But what's needed is people who care, people who will invite them to church or invite them to have a conversation about Jesus. People who will care about not just what that person wants but what that person truly needs. I think of that group at my old church. They were only there because someone cared and because that person took action, they had a faith that led to action, said, "I'm going to get a van. I'm going to load all you up. I'm going to take you there every Sunday." This is why the church exists, to bring glory to God and to bring people to Jesus.

You guys should have got a card on your seat today. I want to pull that card out right now. It says, "I'm praying for an opportunity to share Jesus with someone." There's space for you to write a name down or a few names down. Just take a moment and think about who in your life needs to hear about Jesus. Write those names down, there's pens in the seats in front of you. I'll give you a moment to think about that. Who in your life needs to hear about Jesus? Family member, friends, neighbors, co-workers? Hopefully by now you've thought of someone, someone's come to mind. You guys should do me a favor. If you know someone who has not yet given their life to Jesus, who does not yet believe, would you guys mind raising your hand? If that's you, if you know someone who does not yet know, take a look around. Almost everyone in this room knows someone who needs to hear about Jesus. Every single one of us has someone in our lives who doesn't know him yet. We are called to be the church, to partner with Jesus in His kingdom work. We are the people that can share Jesus with others. You may be sitting there saying to yourself, "Yeah, but I don't know what to say. I don't have all the answers. What if they ask these really hard questions? And what am I supposed to say to that?" Well, I want to say this. It's okay, I'm giving you permission to say, "I don't know." That's a great question. I don't know. That's a really, I see what you're saying there. It's a really hard question you're asking and I'm not sure. I'll let you in on a, it's not a secret. I have a Bible minor, a Masters in Divinity, I'm ordained in the church. I don't know all the questions about the Bible. I put years and hours and I don't know. And I still say I don't know when I come to certain people and I have certain questions and I say, "That's a great, I don't know." And I lead them to what I do know. And this is the encouragement to you. You lead them to what you do know. So you have experience. If you are a believer in Jesus, if you've been following him in your life, then you have experience with Jesus and you share your experience. I don't know that answer that question, but what I do know is I've seen God work in my life. I've seen him provide for me. I've seen him work a miracle. I've seen him heal. I've seen him answer my prayers. I've seen him and how he loves me and I think he wants to love you. I know he wants to love you too. That right there, that's all you say, that is sharing Jesus with other people. And they may come back with, "But why did this happen?" I don't know. I have no idea. But I know that he loves you and he wants a relationship with you. That is sharing the gospel. It's what we're called to do. So the band comes back up for worship.

Hopefully you have someone on your card. And so, yeah, a couple of things. You have that card. You take that with you this week and put it somewhere where you're going to see it. You're going to be praying for that person, where it's going to be in front of you to say, "Hey, I'm praying for an opportunity." And maybe you're as bold as to walk right up and be like, "Hey, we haven't had a conversation yet. I need to talk to you about something." Or maybe you're just praying and you're waiting for the right opportune moment. And then maybe this week, it may be months from now where you have a chance to share. You may also be sitting there thinking, "This person's pretty hopeless and I've tried and I don't know if I'm going to be able to reach them." I want to say this. Sometimes those who look farthest from God are actually the closest because God is doing a work inside of them that we can't see. And sometimes it's at the lowest of lows where they're most open to hearing about Jesus. Even when people we'd love to see come to Jesus seem far away, we need to have hope and believe that God is the God who can do anything. And so you have those names. So I exhort you to look for an opportunity to share what you know, your experience of God with them. And we do this because we are the church. We exist here at Spring Valley to bring glory to God, to bring people to Jesus, to see our community saturated with the glory of God through making disciples in the everyday stuff of life. Do not forget your purpose. Don't leave these doors and this sanctuary thinking, "I just go back and I leave church behind me." No. You go into your life. You go into the people, your neighborhoods, your family, and you carry with you the burden and the desire and the urgency to say, "When I get the chance, when God opens that door, I'm going to share the truth. What's so important to me and what I want someone else to value too." We are all someone in need and we can all be someone who cares about someone by sharing Jesus with them. We're going to head into a time of prayer. We've done this once a month now and Pastor Lauren's going to be on this side. I'll be on this side. And in this next song, we want to invite you to do a couple of things. If you want to respond to what you've heard today in singing, we invite you to stand and sing and praise God. You have those names on those cards. If you want to just pray for those people and take this moment to pray for them and that opportunity to share them, I encourage you to do that. We're going to be on the sides here. If you want to bring those people up and we can pray with you about reaching those people. And if you just have stuff going on in life and you're like, "Look, I barely got here today. I got a lot of questions about what's going on in the world today and I would love some prayer." And please join us up here and we'd love to pray for you.

We Are The Church: Part 1

We Are The Church: Part 1

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

This morning we are doing a first part in a series called We Are The Church and I'm going to get to the sticker on your seat there in a moment for this series, but I want to give you a little peek behind the curtain, okay? Can I do that? As a pastor, let you guys understand a little bit here. There are times when being a pastor is a real struggle. And there are times when I first started studying to be a pastor in college and I moved across the United States. I grew up here in Northern California, Carmichael. I packed up a truck and I moved all the way to Indiana, thousands of miles away from anybody that I knew. At the time, my lovely girlfriend came with me, my now wife. She was there. I had a buddy from high school. He was there. So I had some people, Lauren, she had family in the area, but no family that I knew or that she knew. And it was kind of a struggle. And when we started, when we got to college, we both made a promise to each other that we were going to find a church and we were going to plug into a church and we were going to get connected. And this began probably, I don't know how many months of going and attending a church and then going out to lunch afterwards and going, "Okay, what did we think?" Because honestly, the reality was that we both grew up in really awesome churches and the bar was set so high for us that we found it a struggle to find a church. And as we went around to different churches and we got to know a lot of really cool people, I'm not saying these churches were horrible, it just, it was hard. Midwest church versus West Coast church is a lot different. Way different. And so we would go to a church and we'd go out to lunch and we'd be like, "Okay, we love this about this." We're like, "This is like, oh, that one, that one, that. Not too sure about that. Could we go there?" We kept going. We eventually found a church and we said, "We're not going to just attend until things got weird.”

Because here's the reality. When you go to attend a church, the church isn't batting a thousand every single Sunday. Like, let's be honest. Church isn't perfect every Sunday. The church isn't perfect. So newsflash, if you're searching for a perfect church, welcome, we're not perfect. But as we started attending a church, we said, "Okay, we're committed. This is where we're going to go." And so we started serving. I started serving on the worship team. My wife started serving in youth ministry. And we said, "We're committed to this church." And as we went through college and as I studied the Bible, I felt this hypertension because I realized when I read about scripture and the church and the Bible, the modern church of today didn't look the same. There were some big differences. And as a pastor, we spend a lot of time, I'm not trying to toot my own horn here, okay? As a pastor, Pastor Andrei, myself, Pastor Lauren, we spend a lot of time during the week preparing for a weekend service. And we spend a lot of intention and thought and we try to do our best to think through all the details and we figure out the right songs. Andre spends every year, at the beginning of the year, he spends a good amount of time looking through, reading scripture, helping direct and plan our series for the year. We sit down together. We talk through these series of what each week is going to be like, what part of the scripture we focus on. What is the theme here? What do we want you guys to walk away from after you come to church? And I sit here and I still continue to look at the scriptures and I see, I go, "This church is different than what I see at the church and the Bible." And I think we do what I would hope, I think, a really good job here at Spring Valley, working to teach truth and teach theology and to teach the Word of God.

But when I look at, maybe, let's say outside of the church, I'm going to say Big C Church. You guys mean when I say Big C Church? I mean just the church in general. Let's say just the church in North America. I see churches that are sometimes playing it safe. Churches maybe that are disconnected. Some have slipped, maybe I dare say, into being boring. And I look at the calling of Jesus and the life that He lived. And as Christ followers, meaning we are to emulate Christ in our lives, there is nothing safe about Jesus, right? He touched lepers. He hung out with prostitutes. He called tax collectors to be on His team. There's nothing safe or comfortable about Jesus. And yet when I look at the church, sometimes I see comfortable. I see safe. I see not the picture of what the church was at the beginning. The church that Jesus established, that the Holy Spirit led, that brought down onto the disciples who became the apostles, who became the first pastors in the beginning when Jesus left and went back into heaven. I see a difference there. I see Jesus who was radical. He loved those who hated Him. He blessed those who persecuted Him. Jesus welcomed those who religion of the day had rejected. And this is where I struggle as a pastor sometimes. But not only as a pastor, but also as a disciple of Jesus as I read the Bible and I look at the church today, it pales in comparison to what once was. Jesus didn't come to condemn, it says, but He came to save the world. He came to bring life. And not just simple life, barely getting by life, but life that is full. Life that is vibrant. Life that is attractional to the outside world. And today, the next two weeks after, we're going to take three Sundays and we're going to seek to begin to please God as His church. Because here's the reality, it's not my church. It's not your church. Pastor Andre's church. Not the pastor who founded this church way back in the day. It's not their church. It's God's church. His church. And I want to look at specifically the beginning version of the church in Acts chapter 2 and to give us three mindset shifts. Mindset shifts. Easy for me to say, I speak for a living. For us to think about and walk away today and begin to really think through as we seek God and His church today.

I want to pray real quick. Jesus, we thank you for another wonderful Sunday. God, we thank you for today. God, a day to worship you, to give you praise, the honor and glory. Couldn't think of a better day of the week than right now, God, to gather together to worship you, to give you the praise. And everybody said? Amen.

Well, it says this, Acts chapter 2, if you want to flip there, it's going to be on the screens. You've got a Bible in front of you, a lot of people on your phone. That's awesome. But Acts chapter 2, we're going to start in verse 41, and it says this, "Those who accepted His message were baptized," being those that believed what people said were baptized. And they added to the church that day about 3,000 in all. Peter gathers together a giant group of people, and he begins to preach who Jesus was to these people. And 3,000 people that day say yes to Jesus. Whoa. I wouldn't even know what to do. Let's be honest. You have a program management pastor problem day one as a church. Don't get caught in that. Sorry, side note. "They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions and gave to anyone who had need." Every day, every day, they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes, ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. The Lord added to their number weekly, monthly, yearly.

What was it? Shout it out. Let's go daily those who were being saved. Maybe I could just stop the sermon right here. A little bit different than today, right? A little bit different than Peter saying, "Hey, guys, we're going to meet temple courts Sunday 1030. Get your kids there at 1015. We'll check them into the side yard. We'll get them taken care of. And then service is over. You want to hang out. We're going to have some food. You can bring something to share. But we're going to be at Mary's house on Wednesday for a Bible study if you want to be over there." No, they met together daily. That's pretty awesome. Daily they're hanging out. And then they're Sabbath-ing together. They're having meals together. They're encouraging one another. Someone comes to them and says, "Hey, I need some help. I got it. What do you need? I'm here. Titus over here, he wants to hook you up. He'll take care of you. Just go see Titus." There's just this beautiful picture of this community in Acts chapter two.

So I thought it might be fun. Maybe look at the Big C church today and do today's translation or a modern-day version. This is me. I wrote this. Okay, I'm not saying. I'm not putting this in the Bible. But what if we wrote this about today? It may be something like this. Today's church, it says, "They devoted to their comfort, their happiness, their personal goals, their dream, their bucket list. No one really noticed the Christians because they were focused on themselves. Very few of the believers were together. And when we were, they fought over stupid things. If they sold anything, they used the money to buy something better for themselves. They claimed to love God, but they didn't even love each other. So they felt empty, alone, depressed. As a result, most people disliked them and very few lives were changed.”

Obviously, this isn't the picture that God has for His church. He wants something better for what the Scripture calls His bride, His love. And I think for us, there's been a lot of awesome, great churches and pastors. I don't want to discredit any of that. Okay? I'm here to just like, "Oh, church is so bad." But there has been a lot of things where we've gone astray in the church, right? And the only way that we can become better and to recognize where we can grow is to be honest with where we are at. If we want a different result, we have to have a different mindset. We have to change the way that we think, the way that we do church, the way that we live our lives because the reality is, as your sticker says, we don't just go to church, but we are the church. Say that with me. Say it. We are the church. The church isn't a building. The church isn't a campus on the corner of Sunset and Fairway or wherever in 123 America Boulevard USA. That's not where the church is. We are the church. They didn't have a building. I mean, they had 3,000 people and they didn't have a building. And yet what? God added daily those who are meeting Jesus and His saving grace for the very first time. So for us to become the best version of ourselves as the church, I see three things in this scripture about how the church operated, who they were, their priorities, and what they did. We will have to have three things changed in us to become more like the perfect version of the church from Acts chapter two.

The first thing we will have to be is we will have to be devoted. I just said we don't go to church. We are the church. There you go. You guys are catching. I'm proud of that. We will be devoted. We just don't go to church. We are the church. Oh yes. I love it. I love it. Acts 2:42, it says this, "They devoted themselves to the apostles teaching, the teaching of Jesus and to fellowship, to community, to relationships, to breaking of bread, to food, to caring for one another, to loving each other, to prayer, to practically praying over each other by the power of the Holy Spirit, lifting one another up, going before God." And what the big fancy word would be, "intercession," which just means you're praying for somebody else so that God hears you praying for somebody else and that you love one another in the way that you care by taking time to think about them to say, "Hey God, I want to think about this person right now and what they're going through in their life." This is what the early church did. And when we look at this, I want us to focus in on that word, "devoted." I practiced this Greek word last night. My daughter came out. She's getting ready for bed and I'm literally online playing this Greek word to try to learn how to say it. So I'm about to butcher it real bad for you. But the Greek word for devoted means proskartereō. Yeah, see, you guys don't even know the difference. I love this. Proskartereō. And this word means devoted. It means to live in a constant state of relentless pursuit to be persistent, ongoing, obstinate, devotion. It's an imperfect tense. Ongoing action means it was and it is and it will be. Any English teachers in the room? I think I said that right. English was not my strength. But here's what this is. They were devoted. They were striving every single day to become more and more and more and more like Jesus. To be devoted to something is to strive to keep working at something. Consistency, repetition, habits, one after another after another becoming better and better and better even if it's an incy-binsy teensy-winsy little bit.

This weekend is the start of the NFL season. Okay, you knew I was coming here. You were waiting for it. And so for the past eight weeks, teams have been gathered together in what they call training camp. It's this ramp up period before the season actually starts. We started last Thursday night. And for the last eight weeks, players have done everything that they could to prepare for the season for one goal. One goal. To win a championship. And so for the past eight weeks, they have been obsessed, devoted, persistent with learning a playbook, developing their own personal strength, sharpening their skills, growing themselves hopefully to one time in February, I believe it is, to raise the Vince Lombardi trophy in victory with no other team standing. That's their obsession. And every day, they are persistent with their reps, repetitions. One rep after another after another. Because each rep builds on itself. Because then that begins a habit. And a habit develops a skill. And a skill will eventually show itself on the field when bullets are flying. They talk about some of these players who are just obsessed to a level that is probably unhealthy. Rep after rep after rep. Mental reps, not just physical reps, not just on the practice field or a preseason game or against a scrimmage against another team in a joint practice. But mental reps, too. On the field, off the field, in the classroom, with their coaches, in the weight room, at home, working out, studying their playbook on their own, watching videos of practice. Watching videos of practice. You guys realize that? They film all their practices and they go back and watch their practices again. Obsession. Each day. Because the most devoted, the most persistent are usually the players that are the best players. And they're the ones that can step up when their team is down, the game is on the line, and have ice in their veins and just go. But the players that settle never last long in the NFL. They just don't. Just don't make it. They might have all the skill in the world. I've seen some amazing football players come out of college that have all the skill in the world. But they're not devoted to the game.

And I think for us, it's easy to sit and to point at them and go, "Oh, look at them." But it's easy to settle, right? No, it's just a me thing? I think it's all of us in this room, if we were honest, deep down inside. We settle. But we don't think about settling. We think of just being too easily satisfied. We get to a point and go like, "Okay, I'm good. Life's good. Jobs, nah, not too bad. It's been worse. I'm doing okay. House is good. My marriage is fine. My finances are good. Life's good. I'm set. I don't need to think about anything." We get to a point where we're okay with just living life as it is in front of us, right? Here's the thing. We often settle for too little of God. We're good with a little bit of change of God in our life. And we're thankful for God's grace. Don't get me wrong there. We're thankful for God's grace, His love, and His mercy. Yet we become spiritually satisfied long before the grace of God has completed its work in us. See, I'll tell you today, right now in this moment, there are people in this room that have met Jesus very recently. And there's people in this room that have been following Jesus for a very long time. The truth about both of those people is God's not satisfied with where they are. He's not. And when I look at the early church and I see the apostles and those who follow Jesus and their devotion, their obsession with God and everything that God had for them, it wasn't like they had this big moment. Peter had this big Billy Graham crusade and prayed and 3,000 people came to know Jesus and he just gave them a high five and said, "Go with God." No, it didn't end there. That was just the beginning. And that's the same for us. That when we think about whether it was yesterday or a lot of yesterdays, the moment that we accepted Jesus in our heart, in our lives, we brought His salvation upon us, that was just the beginning. That was just day one of eternity. See the fact that God loves us so much that yes, He sent His Son to die for us on the cross, to give Himself for us so that we would have our sins forgiven. But God also loves us so much that He won't leave us as He found us. God is in the business of transformation, sanctification, and redemption. Now, I'm not talking about earning our salvation by the way that we live our lives and we have to do good and it outweighs. No, no, no, I'm talking about that. Your debt has been paid for eternity. But God's still got work to do in us. And when I look at the early church and I see this and their devotion and their commitment and their striving every single day as they met together in the temple courts, praising God and sharing everything that they had, breaking bread, loving one another, praying for each other, being with each other. I see a "proskartereō" see I said differently their time. I should have done that. Their whole selves in the early church was dissatisfied that they were looking and relentless pursuit for God to have more for them. This should be us too. This should be us. Church, I want to encourage you today, don't quit on the grace of God. It is not complete in you yet. Has God saved you, set your eternity in stone forever? Yes, your name is written in the book of life. You're good. But if you're still here, there's still work that God has for us. And I want us to be grateful for this. This isn't a discouragement thing. I want you to see that. It's just a mindset shift. It's not that we've done something horrible. It's a mindset shift for us to think about as we go forward that God is still working on His grace in our lives. And we are thankful that the Savior through the Holy Spirit continues to work even when we don't necessarily want the work. Okay, I'm done there. I'm done there.

The other thing we have to change is our mindset is that we will be generous. We will be generous. We are not spiritual contributors. We are spiritual contributors. We are not spiritual consumers. Acts 2:44-45 says, "All the believers were together and they had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need." It then says a couple chapters later, further on in the development of the early church. This wasn't just a moment in time right at the beginning. But it says, "And God's grace was so powerfully at work in them all," okay, "continuing to work in them powerfully that there were no needy persons among them. From time to time those who owned land or houses sold them and brought money from the sales." See during this time in the Roman Empire, there were no government programs. There were no food stamps. There was no healthcare. There was no Section 8 housing. There were none of these things, which I think are good things. But those things that actually are now today actually originated in the church. They started in the church. Think about that. Could you imagine today that if the church came to the point where they stepped up, that they actually got rid of all of the welfare programs and all those things because they weren't needed anymore because the church was meeting all those needs? Whoa. That's why the church shined so bright. Because the reality was if you didn't have those things, you were probably homeless on the street and you probably died. That was the reality. Maybe you got sick. Maybe you never got any food. You're begging for your life. And the church shows up and says, "We got you." Everybody contributed. Big, small. And I want to be careful here because we think, "Oh, he's just talking about money.”

No, I'm talking about everything. I'm talking about our all. Yes, I'm talking about money. Let's just call it what it is. Talking about money. I'm also talking about time. You know, these early apostles and people in the church helped other people. Maybe it was fixing something in their home. Maybe it was going out to their farm. But they took time to do that. Maybe it was a skill, a talent that I believe the Holy Spirit gives each and every one of us. He's created us in a unique way to give back in that way. And together they all contributed in a way. They contributed with their money. They contributed with their time. They contributed with their gifts. And when I look at the church today, I don't know if we're all doing that. I don't know if we're all into that point because this idea at this time was completely countercultural. You think life is hard today. Think about life back then. Roman Empire was dog-eat-dog. It was kill the person next to you so you can take whatever they have so you can scrape by. It was ruthless. And the church comes along and says, "We got a better plan for that. The Holy Spirit, Jesus, has a better life for us to live together in community." To the point that no one ever had a need that went unmet. But I want you to catch some things here in these Scriptures. It wasn't that just a few of them had some resources in common. It was everyone. All the believers. Yes, it says in Acts 4 that some had their stuff. They had houses and land that they sold to give. That's great. But all the believers contributed in some meaningful way. Money, clothes, food. This is what it means to be a church. And that also means that all the believers went with less. Because this stuff just doesn't pop out of thin air, right? The extra clothes, the extra food. I don't know. It says they sold houses and land. Was that a second home? A vacation home? Was that development property that they inherited? I don't know. Maybe it was their only thing. And they said, "The gospel is more important than my property." Did I just say that? And because of that, they were able to provide tangible needs to the point that nobody was needy among them. Can I ask you a question today? I'm going to ask it anyway. If someone looked at the way that you spent your money, would they know that you're a Christian? Would they know that you're just a steward of what God has blessed you with? Would they see how you spend or give away or contribute? Would they go, "Yep, that person's a Christian. I can tell." How they spend their money shows their heart. But Chris, you don't get it. You've seen the cost of things lately. Inflation, the housing market. Have you seen everything going on? Yeah, I have. I'm living here too, guys. Did you see the economy and the world and the cost of things in the Roman Empire? The taxes? You think taxes are bad here. Taxes, like Roman Empire robbery, aka like... But they still had generosity. This past year as a church, we had some real financial struggles. I think you guys follow along in the program. But at the bottom on the back, we talk about our finances. And we want to be honest with you. We have budget presentations. We talk about how we spend all of our stuff.

And this last year, unfortunately, we were not able to contribute to certain things in ways that we had previously. Times where there were new churches starting that we knew about and they were planting. We wanted to contribute, but we weren't able to. They were contributing to education of future pastors and church leaders, and we weren't able to. There were times with missions. You guys remember Vivek from India. He came. We've had Shane and Sarah who are doing gathering of nomads. We wanted to contribute to them, but because financially, things were too tight. Here, we did not have enough. We weren't able to contribute to those. And I wrestle with this because I think, okay, it doesn't matter. We still need to contribute, right? We still need to give. Things are tight. Who cares? God's got it all. He's going to take care of it. But it's an us thing. And I will tell you, we have some incredibly generous people in this church. Gosh, guys, I am blown away. I don't know all the details of everything, but I know that there are people who give so much. They give the way the early church did. They go with less so that the church can have more, and they give, and they give, and they give. And it blows my mind. It's amazing. But all of us have a role to play. All of us have a peace to contribute. All of us probably are spending money, myself included, on ourselves in a month that should probably go towards the work of God in His kingdom rather than the work of Chris's kingdom. Relentless devotion. It's hard. I know it is, guys. I get it. But I also get on the other side of eternity, a lot of stuff that we're chasing after just doesn't matter. And the kingdom of God matters. God's work matters.

Final thought for us today as we close is that we will share the love of Jesus. We will be devoted. We will be generous. And we will share the love of Jesus. We are the church, and we exist for ourselves. No, we are the church, and we exist for the world. Acts 2:46-47 says, "Every day they continue to meet together in the temple courts." They're having Bible studies all day long. "They broke bread in their homes. They ate together, glad and sincere hearts. They praising God and enjoying the favor of all God's people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved." See, here's the reality of Spring Valley Church. Spring Valley Church exists here for now, for this moment, for today, and for tomorrow, and for any other day that God continues to allow this church to be here on earth. But you think, "Oh, the big church right over there, big one. They got all the money. They got all the resources. Have you seen how many campuses that church has?" They're the ones that's going to be here. They're the ones that's going to reach everybody. No. There's people in your life that only you can reach. There's people that God has placed next door, the next cubicle, in that staff meeting, at that restaurant you love going to, a coffee shop, your family. Your best friend. God has placed them in your life for you to share Jesus with them. And you are the only person that can do that. You are plan A and there is no plan B. So when we think about why we exist, no one else is you. It is our desire to see our community saturated with the glory of God. But here's the thing about saturation. See, that was a very critical word we put in there. Saturated. Water. You guys remember probably back in the day, it's been a while, I might do the sponge sermon again. Let me bring that one back. But I had a sponge up here and I had this bucket of water and I splashed the sponge and I still got the water spots in my Bible from it. But I had this sponge and I took this sponge out and I squeezed it and all this water ran out. I said, God has given us for us to absorb who He is into us, so as we go through life we leave a little wet mark of Jesus with everybody that we meet. But here's the reality. That bottle of water that I poured over that sponge, I have to open that bottle to get the water out to saturate the sponge. Some of us are bottling up Jesus in our life and we're keeping Him on the shelf and He's great. We go see Him, we hang out with Him, we maybe drink a little bit, put the cap back on, send Him back on the shelf. God wants to rip that bottle off the top and dump it out in your life. Dump it out in the lives of your family, dump it out in your friends. He wants to flood their lives with His love to where things they have no idea are coming for Him. He wants to knock them down like a wave of the ocean with a kid not paying attention. That's what He wants to do to them. He wants to just all over them with His love. And you're the only person in their life to share that Jesus with them, to saturate them with His love and His glory.

Heard this quote this week from Paul David Tripp. He says, "This is your mission and every relationship in your life to make the grace of the invisible king visible." Spring Valley Church, we are going to be a faith-filled, big thinking, bet the farm risk takers we will never insult God with small thinking or safe living. Are we a small church? Absolutely. Are we the average in America? Absolutely. Does God have more for us than that? Absolutely. God is moving in this church in powerful ways, but it's gonna have to take all of us. It's gonna have to take all of our devotion. It's gonna have to take all of our generosity. And it's gonna have to take all of us sharing the love of Jesus with our worlds. We got a pretty cool group of pastors here. Can't do it all. God has that calling on your heart and your life. So what do you want me to do about it, Chris?

Here's the final closer here. I want to give an open invitation for each and every one of you to change the object of your devotion with one step. Change the object of your devotion with one step towards Jesus. What does that look like? Well, for you, it may be reading God's Word. You're gonna say, "Pastor Chris, I'm gonna commit. Every single day I'm gonna start reading God's Word." If you haven't, okay. No shame, no guilt, no nothing. Change. Do it. Go forward. But I want to give you a warning. You gotta be careful. Because the Word of God, as it says, is alive and is active and is living. It's gonna begin to change who you are. So be careful.

Maybe you need to start stepping up and serving in church. We just launched three classes today. It's awesome. We got three classrooms rocking. We have an amazing team back there, but we still don't have enough volunteers. We got other slots where we got holes and we're kind of putting things together. We're trying to make things happen because God's doing some amazing things here. And we don't want to just sit and wait for everything to fall into place perfect and then step forward. We got to step forward in faith. But I want to warn you, if you start serving in church, it's addictive. You start loving on people. You start loving on them. Start loving on people. Start helping kids. Start talking to people on a Sunday morning saying, "Hello, you want to talk to more people? You want to see how they're doing? You want to serve in a tangible way?" It'll be addictive.

Maybe some of us need to start tithing. When you start with our finances and our time and the talents that we've been given, we need to start tithing into God's church. But we got to be careful because your heart follows where you give. You start giving, you might want to start giving more and more. And you might hear about this need over here and go, "God, I want to take care of that." You might hear about this need. You might see this person in your life. "I want to do that. I want to do that. I want to do that." We gather up the ties and the offerings every week. We have the envelopes. You guys put your stuff in there. There's a guy in church he writes down, he says, "For God's work." Every week. And I love it. For God's work. Sometimes you think about, "Oh, the church just wants my money for the church to have my money." It's for God's work. It's for other churches to start, for more people to find Jesus. It's for more pastors to have the call, to be developed, to go out and to do more churches and to lead churches better. It's for God's work around the world and missions and missionaries putting their lives on the line in some of these places where they can't even talk about where they are. One of those is Vivek. We don't know where exactly he is. He can't tell us. Because he's had police show up on a Sunday morning and shut their church down. It's happening around the world, guys. What if together with our generosity we could change the world for God? That's something that's worth investing in, right?

Maybe you need to start praying daily. You go, "God, sometimes I just come to you when I need something. I need to come to you when I went just to be in your presence. I want to lift up my brothers and sisters in this family who are going through some really tough times right now." But I want to warn you, God, be careful. Because you're going to start seeing miracles and you're going to start praying more. And you're going to start seeing more miracles and more miracles and more things. You're going to see God moving in his church and in his family in powerful ways. You see lives transformed. Maybe you've seen some scary spiritual stuff happen in this realm. Maybe you start praying more. One thing I want to ask of you is the saffron of the Bible.

One thing I want to ask of you is this afternoon you're going to get a text from the church. And it's going to be an invite to answer some questions. And this is going to be what we call our church pulse assessment. And what it's going to do, it's going to take about eight to ten minutes of your time, maybe a little bit more. But it's going to ask you some questions about your personal focus with Christ. But it's also going to ask you about the church health. And this is going to be a critical tool for us as a team to be able to help lead and guide this church into the next seasons. And it's going to measure across seven dimensions. Not like weird matrix dimensions, but just like seven different ways. That makes sense. Seven different perspectives. We'll say perspectives instead of dimensions. But you're going to get this text. I'm going to ask of you. And the expectation is here. And this is what we want. We want each and every person in the church to answer this 100%. Honestly, there is no right or wrong answer. There isn't. But for us to be able to become forward and grow and to become the church that God, that He wants us to be, we have to address where we are and how we become better and areas of growth that we see in ourselves. And so you're going to get this text. You'll probably get a couple of these texts. We're going to bombard you over the next three weeks. I don't know about all apologize right now, but I'm not really apologetic. I want you to fill out this survey. So that we can help become the best church that God wants us to be.

The church is not a place to go. It is who we are. We're here to proclaim the good news that Jesus came to seek and to save the lost. And I want to be honest. Come with your doubts. Chris will never go there. We'll never be there. Okay. God's a little bit bigger than that. But bring God your doubts. Bring Him your fears. Bring Him your anxiousness. Bring Him your brokenness. Bring Him your sin. Bring Him whatever. He's not too scared of it. He's not going to be pushed away by it. I want people to come to this church and when they come that they see Jesus. That's what I want. And I read the early church was the church that came and saw Jesus. I think we're doing a good job. But I know we can do better. I know we'll become better. I know we have places to grow.

Close with this scripture. Love the scripture. Ephesians 3:20. I'm just going to close out Pastor Andre if that's okay. We're just I'm just going to close this out. And I want us to just really look at this scripture. Can we put that on screens? Ephesians 3:20. And this is my prayer for this whole series, this whole time, for all of us that we're doing right here. And if you want to receive this as a benediction and just kind of a blessing as you go today, do that. You want to see receive this as encouragement. You want to receive this as like, let's go. I'm ready to go. I'm pumped. Get me out there, coach. I want to do this thing. Read it as that. But it says this, actually, let's read this. Just read this all together. Okay, here we go. “Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine, according to His power that is work within us. To Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen.”

Amen. Amen. Go with God today. Excited to see you back next week, part two. Answer that assessment with the text later this afternoon, sometime this week. I love you guys. Go with Jesus. Amen. Thanks for listening. And if you would, please take a moment to subscribe and leave an encouraging review to help others find our podcasts on whatever platform you are listening on. We hope you have a wonderful day. We'll catch you next week.

Pre-Decide: Part 7

Pre-Decide: Part 7 - I AM A FINISHER

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

So we've been in this series talking about pre-decide and we're going to wrap that up this week but but first I want to kind of maybe talk to those in the room who have ever felt like giving up. You've felt like you want to give up. You got you got into a place in life maybe maybe you at one point... Oh wonderful thank you sir. Maybe at one point you had a dream or you had a goal you had a vision maybe you started with great anticipation you're all excited about you kicked it off. It was going great, but then you hit a wall. You hit resistance and then all of a sudden you found yourself in a place with little to no progress. Frustration started to set in. You felt like discouraged. You wanted to give up. Anybody ever been in a situation like that? Maybe this week. Maybe yesterday. Maybe this morning. I don't know. But maybe you found yourself in a situation where you had a relationship where you really wanted to restore it. You wanted amend it and you tried everything you could you poured energy and time and effort into it and then you found yourself with an even more broken relationship on the other side maybe you're fighting to save your marriage you're doing everything you can you're pouring everything into it but you're just running out of fight you're maybe you're believing for a miracle you have something that you have been praying about every single day for God to do in your life maybe your kids live maybe in a friendship maybe a healing a financial situation like God I need you to do something here I need a miracle you need God to help you overcome maybe an addiction and you tried and you've prayed and you believe but you have seen little to no results and you're losing hope I want to talk with those today who have ever felt in that place or maybe you're in that place today and I want to if you're gonna write something down this morning I want you to write this down when you want to give up we're gonna talk about that today. If you would pray with me. Jesus we thank you for this morning God thank you for those who are here to be able to gather with us God we pray for those who aren't able to be here but are still watching us and joining us through the awesome thing called the internet Jesus we thank you for your blessings in our lives every day and Jesus I pray that the word that you have for us today that you would make it absolutely 100% clear that we would know exactly what you want us to do you know exactly how we're supposed to take that first step today we thank you Jesus, Amen

Well we are concluding a series today and called pre decide and we've been in for five, six weeks or so. And we've been talking about this idea of our decisions. And we first started off, the first week we talked about the quality of our decisions, of your decisions, my decisions, determines the quality of our life. Problem is, we're not good decision makers, right? We try really hard and there's times where we just nail it. We knock it out of the park, we kill the decision. we're like, yeah, look at what I did right here, yes. But then other times you're like, I'm just so, just, I can't. And we just make the wrong decision. Well, our series we're focusing on the statement we've been talking about and this idea of when we're faced with a certain situation, we have pre decided to take a specific action. So when you find yourself in this place, but beforehand without emotion, with the leading of God's will on our lives and His word and prayer and focus and encouragement from our community, we have pre-decided to make this specific action when faced with this certain situation. We've had this statement, we had this circle, we handed out stickers. And if you want one of these cool circle stickers, we got some in the back on the table, we'd love for you to take one home. But we have these six things that we're focusing on. And we've been talking about how I am ready. Say it with me, I am ready. Oh, you're ready, I love it. Talking about I am consistent, I am devoted, I am generous, I am faithful, and by the will of God and His faithfulness in our lives, we will be a finisher. And that's what we're talking about today. I know one thing about the desire to finish. I'm a project guy, I love projects, I love to do things, I love to get my hands dirty, but the desire to finish, it is so easy to start, right? So easy to start, but it is so not easy to finish, right? My wife, God bless her heart, has been living in a kitchen now for over a year. She's got really awesome countertops, painted cabinets, new appliances, but no backsplash. It's just cement board. Just basically plywood on the walls. Everything else looks awesome. New sink, garbage disposal, it's beautiful. No backsplash. I am famous for starting things, but never getting to the point of finishing them.

See, this idea for us is a lot more important than I think people understand, right? Because I want to ask you a certain question, and I think you'll be able to understand, is what do you think separates average people from amazing people? What's the difference from those who are really fulfilled in life and those who are often empty, maybe those who struggle or those who succeed? I will tell you, it is not their intelligence, it's not their appearance, it's not their It's not their education. It's not who or what they know It the difference is their perseverance their perseverance Their willingness to stick to it their grit to finish their drive to preserve Persevere the refusal to quit there was this big study that was done recently that that interviewed successful people And we're talking talking a fortune 500 business leaders. We're talking successful military leaders We're talking teachers, we're talking even like spelling bee champions, like the whole spectrum of people. They did this research and all this was down to one quality that separated unsuccessful people and successful people. And it's one quality and it is this. It is grit. Grit. The definition of grit, if you don't know what word I'm talking about, is the strength of character that refuses to quit. If you follow the NFL, there's a team out of Detroit right now that is all about grit. They got into the playoffs, but not very far in the playoffs, okay? I'm just kidding. It's going against my whole sermon. But the lady who did this whole research, her name is Angela Duckworth, and she has this quote with this giant study that she did. She said, "Enthusiasm is common." You can find it everywhere. Everybody's excited about something, right? So excited for this. I can't wait for this, can't wait for this. This is happening, I'm really pumped. But endurance is rare. Endurance is extremely, extremely rare. Grit is this difference that it is not what you know or who you know, but it's your willingness to stay in the fight. Easy to start, it's hard to finish. And this is why we wrap up our whole series with this one statement we just said, it said, I am a finisher. We are pre-deciding to be finishers. And by nature, we wanna take the easy way out, right? We wanna take the simple road, the easy path. The one of least resistance, that's like boom here to there. Like I am constantly when I drive on ways with my app. Why? Because I wanna know if there's traffic, or something in the road, I want the easy way, I wanna get home as quick as I possibly can. We live in that world today.

But our big decision today that we are making when we pre-decide to be a finisher is this. It says, "When I commit, I don't quit. "I am a finisher." Say this with me, he says, "When I commit, I don't quit, I am a finisher." a finisher. And why is that? Well because us as disciples of Jesus, how do we persevere? How do we strengthen? Because the devil wants to pull us back, right? The devil wants us to quit. The devil wants us to throw off our game. So how do we strengthen ourselves so when we get to the point where we want to quit that we don't? There's this moment, I want to look at the words of Apostle Paul. And he's in prison, and he's writing this letter to basically his spiritual son Timothy. And he's in jail under the Emperor Nero, and he's basically waiting to be beheaded. And he's in a dungeon, well really more of like a sewer. So he's like underground in a sewer, and he's just waiting to be killed. And this was a really common place for these people to wait to be executed. And a lot of them honestly wouldn't even survive just being in the sewer. They would just die even before their execution. But Paul is writing this letter to his spiritual son, Timothy, with all of his emotion and everything that he has. Essentially, these are his last words. And he writes it to Timothy. We see this in 2 Timothy 4:5. He says to him, Paul, “Do not be afraid of suffering for the Lord. Work at telling others the good news and fully carry out the ministry that God has given to you.” You think I'd be here to encourage you this morning? I am, but we gotta get through some stuff first. But here's the reality. If we're gonna finish like we say we are, we're gonna likely suffer. We're likely gonna go through some hard times. And honestly, being a Christian doesn't mean that you don't have hard times. It actually means honestly the opposite, that being a Christian, a follower of Jesus, a disciple of God Almighty means that we're probably most likely absolutely going to suffer. And in other words, Paul here is trying to tell Timothy that don't be afraid. Don't be afraid, but carry out the ministry that God has given you, even if you're going to suffer. He continues on, "As for me, my life has already been poured out as an offering to God. The time of my death is near. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have remained faithful." Paul here is saying, I've been in the battle. I've not given up. I fought the good fight. I have remained faithful and I have pressed forward even in the face of suffering. Here is what is really powerful about this. And I think Paul here has finished his race. There's nothing that's gonna save him. There's nothing that's gonna rescue him. History shows us that after this point, he is beheaded, he is killed, he no longer lives here on earth, but in heaven.

And what is powerful is that it's obvious that Paul has finished his race, but you and I have not finished ours. You and I have not finished our race yet. And if you find yourself in a place of discouragement or feel like giving up, maybe God might be saying to you even today, if you're not dead, you're not done. If you're not dead, you're not done. There is more for you to do. God has more for you. I see some of you checking yourself. Am I alive in this moment right here? Yes, you are. God's got more for you to do. He still has more plans, more assignments. He's got more stuff for you to do. He's got more ministry for you to do. He's got more business for you to do. He's got more content for you to take. He's got more hope for you to share, more friendship for you to make, for more addictions to break. Turn to the person next to you and say, "God's got more for you." Come on, come on. God's got more for you. If you're not dead, you're not done. There's more for you to do. And Paul here is encouraging Timothy, I might be done, but you aren't done yet. fully finish, fully finish the work that God has started in you. But you don't get it, Pastor Chris. I'm tired. I'm tired, and not just tired, but I'm turd. I am tired, I'm tired. I know, I talked to some of you guys. Hey, how was your week? I'm tired. How you guys doing? I'm busy and I'm tired and I'm tired and I'm busy. I'm tired, I'm busy. I'm tired, I'm busy. I'm tired. A lot of us feel like there is so much to get done, right? So much still to get done. Author and speaker, David Allen has this quote I think might help encourage us today. “It's as much of the stress that people feel doesn't come from having too much to do, it comes from not finishing what they've started.” Maybe some of you have this just constant stress in your life that what you have to do isn't getting done. and that you don't know how you're gonna move forward.

If you guys would with me, just kind of have, just mentally right now, just kind of shift into this posture of prayer. I wanna read some scripture of you and ask you a question, but kind of just have this moment of posture or prayer is that I want you to set yourself up for maybe what God wants to share with you this morning in this moment today that you would be listening to him and maybe something that God is prompting you of something that you haven't finished. And I'm not talking about like, oh yeah, pastor, I haven't finished season four of that on Netflix. But like, I'm talking about something really spiritual, okay, something spiritual. Jesus says this to the church in Sardis in Revelation. He says, "I know your deeds. You have a reputation of being alive, but you're dead." Maybe you feel like that this morning. Someone would say, "Oh, you're such a good Christian, but deep down inside, you're like, I'm just not feeling it." Jesus says, "Wake up, strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have found your deeds unfinished in the sight of God." Here's the question I want to ask you. What is your unfinished business? Maybe it's a unfinished assignment. What is it more specifically though as a follower of Jesus? Maybe you once were prompted to do something, you know you were supposed to do it, you thought you were going to do it, you really wanted to go and do it, You hoped to do it, you thought about doing it, and you knew you were supposed to maybe say something, you were prompted to give something, maybe you were looking to reach out to someone. What is it that you were prompted to do? Maybe you were supposed to reach out and mend a relationship. Maybe you were supposed to step out in faith and take a step that you didn't know all that was gonna happen after that, but God said, I need you just to take this step. Maybe you were something as simple as you were supposed to go finish your degree, but you just, you haven't yet. Maybe you were supposed to start some kind of hobby or you're supposed to start join a community group. We're kicking off on Wednesday. Maybe you're supposed to start serving in the church in a way with the gifts and talents that God has given you. Maybe you were supposed to follow through with something, but you just never got there? Maybe a physical goal, a spiritual goal, maybe even to just apologize to someone, but you just never got there.

What's the unfinished business that you have in your life that God has asked you to do? What just, let that kind of sink in for a moment. What would God be saying to you? Paul has some really incredible advice And this in 2nd Corinthians, he says, “Here’s my advice It would be good for you To finish what you started a year ago church.” and Corinth got off to this great start They were doing all these amazing things and it kind of just Like all of us it just fizzles out, right? “Last year you were the first who wanted to give and you were the first to begin doing it Now you should finish what you started.” What's your Maybe you're thinking about it right now. Maybe you're like, "I don't even know what you would want me to do right now." But I think we have to answer the question of, "What if we don't do it?" What if we don't follow through? I mean, honestly, there's some things in life that we should quit. So I'm not talking about those things and we can't do everything, but each of us has something that we are called to do. Some of us have divine assignments on our lives, but we have yet to finish them. So what does it matter if we quit? Today, you are going to face an opportunity to determine who you are. You're gonna show that, let's put it this way. You are going to cast a vote for your future self in this moment, that you are going to either decide to do what you're supposed to do and cast a vote to be a finisher, or you're gonna decide not to do that, and you will then in turn cast a vote for being a non finisher.

So the question for us is, who are we? This is why it's important. You're gonna come, you're gonna face a moment in life, whether maybe some of you have faced this before, you're probably gonna face something in the near future where you're gonna have to make a tough decision. And you're gonna have to decide the kind of person you are. you are going to cast a vote into which camp of the person that you want to be. And you're gonna face something and some moment where it's gonna seem like impossible odds. It's gonna seem like everything is stacked against you. It's gonna seem like you're gonna have people and friends in your life that are gonna turn to you and say, there's no chance that this is ever gonna come through. But God is standing there saying, I want you to take this step of faith. And you're gonna have to decide, will I face this adversity? Will I overcome the greatest pillars of faith in the halls of history have faced this and chosen correctly? Was it easy? Absolutely not. Was it all fun and celebration did a confetti cannon go off when they made the right decision? No, most likely not, maybe. But they at some point had to make the tough decision. It didn't mean they didn't struggle through it, but you didn't see them quit. Just because I'm up here with the carpet, the table, and the podium doesn't mean that I have it figured out. Can I be honest with you? I wanted to quit yesterday. I did. I 1,000% wanted to quit, but then I knew that I was going to have to be here at 10 a.m. to give a sermon to myself and you guys. This sermon is so much, just as much for me as it is for you guys here today. Saturdays for some reason in our house have just been chaos. And I think it's because the devil knows that Sunday's coming, right? The devil knows Sunday's coming and he's like, I gotta knock that pastor off of his path. 'Cause if I can, then I can start messing with Spring Valley. So if you guys are thinking of Pastor Andre and myself on Saturdays, people will be praying for us. We covet your prayers, you guys are amazing. I know there's so many of you that pray for us every single day and we feel it, we feel it. But I wanted to quit yesterday. But I knew I couldn't. And I struggled through it. So you may see me struggle, but I'll tell you 100% here today, right now and forevermore, I will never quit. I will never quit.

And the apostle Paul is this incredible like superhero of the faith. He's just this stellar pillar of the early church. And he even himself struggled, but he never quit. He fought through day after day after day. And he shares what I would consider his life motto in Acts chapter 20 at the end of his life. He says, "However, I consider my life worth nothing to me. "My only aim is to finish the race "and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me, "the task of testifying to the good news of God's grace." "My only goal in life," Paul says, "is to finish the race." But there's this little phrase in there of this power-packed verse that I think some of us just kinda gloss over real quick. And it answers the question of, how could Paul finish the race? He says this right at the beginning, because he wasn't running for himself. He says, I consider my life worth nothing to me. Paul says, it's not about me. It's not about my dreams. It's not about my desires. It's not about his popularity. Paul says, "I consider my life worth nothing." And I had this thought yesterday in the midst of wanting to quit. Me wanting to quit what God has called me to do was maybe because I cared something about more than running God's race. And I think for some of us, we might find ourselves in that place. That there might be something that we care about more, whether we want to admit it or not, than God's race that he's called each and every one of us to run. And we have to really wrestle with this. And this concept of, I consider my blank worth nothing to me. What would that be? Maybe your comfort. Maybe your net worth, your opinions of others, social media follows, your personal hopes and dreams that you can only finish the race that God has called us to run when we commit to him and we don't quit. So how do we run our race? How will you and I finish? We can't run it for ourselves. We can only run it for God. And when you run it for God, the only way that you can is to take it one step at a time. So I want to encourage you this morning, take the next step. Take the next step. And here's what's even greater. You don't have to finish your race today. This is a life long journey day in, day out, week in, week out, month in, month out, year in, year out, decade in, decade out. centurion in, I don't think we'll get there but just take the next step. This is how Paul lived his life moment by moment. If you've read his story it is crazy.

When we look at the greatest example of Jesus, he lived this life. He took it one step at a time. And Jesus is on the cross right before he looks up to his heaven and basically cries out, "Into your hands, God, I commit my spirit," and he breathes his wrath. Just before that, he says, "Telestai, it is finished." finished He's saying I did everything you sent me here to do dad I'm coming home. I finished my race Jesus wasn't running for himself He was running for his father Day by day week by week month by month year by year painful moment after painful moment, he just took the next step. When they hated him, he just took the next step and loved them back. When they struck him on the cheek, he just took the next step and turned the other cheek. When he was carrying the cross up the hill, he fell down. He stood back up and took the next step. When he was hanging there on the cross and they cursed him and they mocked him and they shamed him He took another step and says father forgive them. They just don't know what they're doing From that very moment Jesus decided that he is going to always be ready He's always gonna be consistent He's always gonna be devoted. He's always gonna be generous He's always gonna be faithful, and he's always gonna be a finisher. So what are you and I gonna do? The trajectory of our life is always towards what is easy, what's convenient. And the devil's gonna want you to quit, I'll just be honest here. He's gonna want you to give up on what God has called you to start and to do. So you and I are going to have to pre-decide that no, we're not gonna do that, but that when we commit, we will not quit. When you run for God, you run one step at a time.

There's the story of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. And there's this runner sprinter by the name of Derek Redmond. And he was basically the shoe in for the 400 meter. He was gonna win it hands down. There was no other competition. There was nobody that was gonna even come close to him. It was all his, it was basically you might as well and put the gold medal on him before the gun went off. And the gun goes off and they start the race and about halfway through, he collapses to the track and he ruptures his hamstring. All the training, all the early mornings, all the late nights, all the perfect meals, all the perfect schedule, all the travel, all the meeting with coaches and doctors and trainers, everything that he had put into this moment in an instant is completely shattered. Everything is gone. The Olympic hope and dream doesn't exist anymore. And as he lays there on the track in pain and agony, his dad is there to watch him. And his dad gets up out of his seat, gets down on the track, walks up to his son, picks him up, and the two of them hobble to finish the race. Here's what I want you to get. You and I running this race don't run alone. We don't run alone. The Father is there with us every single step of the way. So when we slip up, when we fall down, when we mess up, when we don't make the right choice, God is there with us, carrying us along. It says in Philippians, "Be confident of this, "that he, being God, who began a good work in you, "will carry it to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”

You never run alone. So, you may see me struggle. You may see me want to quit, but I won't quit. Because when I commit, I don't quit. I'm a finisher. And you, because you're a disciple of Jesus, and he is the ultimate finisher, he is the author and perfecter of our faith, that when he says he started it, he will finish it. 'Cause Jesus says, "When I commit, I don't quit. "I am the finisher." Pray with me. Jesus, we thank you for today. God, we are so incredibly grateful for your grace, your mercy, your hope. And so Jesus, today I pray that you would speak truth into our lives. God, that you would reveal where maybe we have unfinished business. That God, you would reveal this to us right here, right now, today, in this moment, or maybe this week, God, that you would reveal of where we need to finish. And God, I pray that you would give us the strength for us to be faithful. That every day that we would find ourselves running for you, not for ourselves, not for our own glory or our own recognition, but running for you, God. Taking that next step, even when we don't understand, even when it might not make sense, even when we don't fully understand how the race is going to finish, God, but that we would just take the next step in you and that we may at the end of our life here on earth when we see you in heaven that we ourselves may be faithful as Paul and as Jesus and as so many others before us have been so faithful to finish that race God made we to finish the race that we may be faithful to you that we may be be a finisher. Jesus, thank you for being the ultimate example of a finisher.

Pre-Decide: Part 6

Pre-Decide: Part 6 - I AM FAITHFUL

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

I wanna ask you a question real quick. as we jump in, if you had one word, it would be a goal or something to achieve in life, what would that one word, what would you choose to be that one word for you? Just one word, one word that you would do everything you can that you would want and desire for it to represent your character, maybe your nature, everything that would summarize for what you stand for in life. What would that one word be? There was a recent survey, a study done of people both in and outside of the church. And they were asked this very same question and the top three common answers that came out from this survey, the first of which, and these are all really good things. The first of which are the word that people says they wanna be successful. And I like this, I like this. I think God wants us to be successful. God makes successful people. God creates successful people and gives them opportunities. And I hope and pray that you find success in life. The second word would be influential. And this is a good word. This is another good word. And for us as Christians, this is a good word because as Jesus calls us, we're to be salt and light in the world, to push back darkness, to change things, that we are called as ambassadors to make a difference in this life for the kingdom of God. The third word was happy. I think each and every one of us deep down inside, we can really resonate with this word, right? Another term might be used here would be a blessed or a fulfilled life. But even as good as these three words are, there is what I believe one word that in God's eyes should stand above all of the rest. So that when we get to heaven, and if we live a life that pleases God, he won't say to us when we meet him face to face, "Well done, my good and successful servant." He won't say that. He won't say, "Well done, my good and influential servant." He's not gonna say, "Well done, my good and happy servant." What he will say to us, Jesus will say, "Well done, my good and faithful servant." And that there was one word that would stand above every other word I believe that we should strive to be faithful, that we should be the faithful of Christ. Turn the person next to you and say, you're looking faithful today. Looking faith, yeah, there we go. That's right, I like it, I like it. If you were to write something down this morning, I want you to write down this morning of one word that will change your life. And that's what we're gonna be talking about this morning.

Pray with me. Jesus, thank you so much for this morning. God, we pray for those who aren't able to be with us, those who are joining us online. Jesus, I pray that you would touch their hearts right now, wherever they are. God, whatever they're walking through in life right now, Jesus, you are right there beside them. They are not alone in what they are going through. And Jesus, I pray for us who are here, present, in person, Jesus, that your word would speak over our lives today, that we would, you have something specific for us, Jesus. And so I pray that you would reveal that to us and that we would not leave here the same as when we walked in those doors this morning, Jesus. Transform our hearts, transform our lives, make us into who you want us to be today, Jesus. We thank you for your love. Amen.

Today, we're gonna be talking about this idea of being faithful. And if you've been with us, we've been in this series, Predeciding, And we've been talking about our decisions and how the quality of our decisions determines our quality of life. But the reality is we're not all really good decision makers. Sometimes we get it right and that's awesome. And we're like, thank you, Jesus, I made it. And sometimes we royally mess up and we say, thank you, Jesus, you're here with us. Thank you for your grace, right? And we've had kind of this saying that we've been talking about that when faced with a particular situation, that we are by the health of God with the direction of Scripture, pre-deciding what we are going to do in that situation. We're not gonna let emotions drive us, we're not gonna get caught off guard, we're not gonna play catch up, we're not gonna be trying to figure things out on the fly, but we are pre-deciding that we are gonna take a particular action when faced in a certain situation. There's six specific things we've been talking about. And a couple of weeks ago, we handed out these stickers for you guys to take, to place different. We got a bunch of them in the back still. If you want a second one, please, second, third, please take those. You are welcome to those. Put them everywhere. Put it on a water bottle, put it in your mirror, put it in your car. I don't know, put it on your computer or wherever you see this to remember. We've been talking about these six topics. and the first of which was ready. Say, "I am ready." There we go. We talked about this, that the enemy is out there scheming, trying to get us off our game, but we have to pre-decide to be ready. We had to pre-decide to be consistent. Say, "I am." Let's go. Now you're waking up. All right, now you're getting the flow. Say it with me. "I am devoted. I am generous. I am faithful." And next week, Pastor Lauren's gonna wrap us up with I am a finisher.

Now, today, we're specifically talking about being faithful and that the reason that we are pre-deciding to be faithful is that you never accidentally, by happenstance, just fall into being a person who is consistently faithful. I'm talking about a day in, a day out, a week in, a week out, a month in, a month out, a year in, a year out, a decade in, a decade out type of faithfulness. That we will constantly be faithful, but that doesn't come without intentionality. See, the reason I think that we find this really difficult, let's call it what it is. Can we be honest this morning? Is that the trajectory of our life, we like to follow the easy path, right? We'd like to follow that path of least resistance, whatever's convenient and being faithful, like especially faithful to God is rarely easy. It's often hard, it comes with a cost, but I wanna tell you today that it is always, always, always worth it. I love these words from the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk. In Habakkuk 4:2, he says, "Look at the proud. They trust in themselves." Anybody know someone proud in your life? Don't point at them, don't make eye contact, don't elbow them, keep focus for them. We're gonna leave friends today, okay? But everybody knows somebody who's proud, right? They trust in their own wisdom. They have all the knowledge, right? They got it all figured out. They have the righteousness. They have the goodness. They got the bank account. They have the abilities. They have themselves. But what does scripture tell us? They trust in themselves and their lives are crooked. But the righteous, righteous will live in their own wisdom. by their faithfulness to God. Say that together, the faithfulness to God. Unfortunately, I'm usually in the earlier crowd and I find myself proud at times. I often think that I can do it on my own. I think that I have it figured out. I think that I'm sufficient enough, that I'm good enough, that I can do it all by myself. But if the scripture is true, we believe it to be true that being proud is not good, but that we have to be intentional to press into the righteousness of God and to live in His faithfulness.

Now this raises a question for us. What does it mean to be faithful? What does it truly mean to be faithful? How do we practically live that out? If you would have asked me probably before this week or the week before working on the sermon, I probably would have said that I would not cheat on my spouse, wouldn't cheat on my taxes, that I would be honest, I try to be a good person. And I think all of that is true. Yes, that is faithfulness. But when we look at who Jesus is, he's really intentional on how he shows faithfulness. And if you were to do a study on the life of Jesus, the moments of where he shows faithfulness, there's really three big categories that come out of looking at his life. The first of which we would see how Jesus treats people. You would see how Jesus talks about stewarding resources, and you would look to see how that you respond to God. And we look at Jesus's faithfulness, it boils down to three categories, relationships, taking care of what has been given, and how we respond to God. See, when you look at these ways that Jesus says, This is how you are faithful. We as Christ followers, following in the footsteps of Jesus in his example, we have to pre-decide three things. That we are going to pre-decide in faithfulness that every interaction is an opportunity to add value. We're gonna pre-decide that we're gonna be faithful in relationships. We're gonna talk about every resource is an opportunity to multiply. That because Jesus designed faithfulness is how we steward what He trusts to us. And that every prompting is an opportunity to obey God. Because every time Jesus talks about faithfulness, He talked about how you treat people, how you steward resources and how you respond to God. Let's dive into this first one. Every interaction is an opportunity to add value. If we are going to be faithful, we're going to have to pre-decide that every interaction with every person that we have is an opportunity to add value. So what does this mean? How do we see this played out? I think for you, whoever you come in contact with, every person you meet, Everyone that you see is an opportunity to bless, to encourage, to be generous with, to add value to their life. And we are going to pre-decide that every person is an opportunity for us to show love of God in a way that brings value and blessing to their life. And see, the reason is it isn't because we're focused on ourselves, because we are, right? We all are focused on ourselves, you and I both. And I can prove it, right? If there's a picture of eight people, you're in a group photo, you see that group photo, who are you looking at first? Yourself, right? You're looking at that photo, you're looking at yourself and you're going, okay, how do I look? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it not good? Because the reality is that you are looking at yourself. If you're blinking in it, you're thinking, oh my gosh, how embarrassing. That is completely un-postable. And anybody who does post that does not love you. Like that really, right? Like you're thinking there's no way that this can be shared. We have to immediately delete. I don't want anybody to see this. You look at you first, we all do it. And so how does that translate into adding value to people? When you interact with them, when you talk with them, what are you usually thinking? Do they like me? Is what I'm saying interesting? Did what I say just make sense? Oh no, what did I just say? I can't believe I just said that. How do I end this conversation and walk away immediately? I am so embarrassed, right? That's what's going through our mind. Each and every one of us, we're thinking, how can this be happening? And you walk away and you think about the conversation and go, okay, I shouldn't have said that. Shouldn't have said that differently. Oh man, I wish I could go back and take that back. And oh, just all this stuff.

But what if instead of saying, will they like me? Am I saying the right things? What if, because the reality is that Jesus lives in you and you have pre-decided ahead of time that every moment you have interacted with others is not focused on yourself, but that you are in this moment going to add value to others' life, that I am going to bless others with everything that I do, and I am going to focus on them. This is faithfulness. Ephesians 4:29 says, "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your nouns, but only for what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen." I love this. This is so good. To be faithful to God means that you are going to add value to others. that when you walk into a room, you are a climate change. Because when you walk into the room, if we believe what scripture says, that the Holy Spirit is on us, that we are ambassadors of Christ, we are different than the world, right? That when we walk into a room, we bring Jesus with us. And because we bring Jesus with us, the room is different. Right? So that wherever you go, whether you're in the grocery store, you're at school, you're at work, you're picking your kids up, you're at a soccer game, you're out running errands, wherever you're at the gym, I don't know where, wherever you are at, you are bringing Jesus with you. This isn't a, you come into church, you sit down, hey Jesus, what's up? How's it going? I'll see you in six days. Peace out. But that we take Jesus with us, that you are an encourager, you are a blessing. You tell the truth, even though it may hurt, but with love, cover in love, okay? But you are that, when you walk away, because of you living intentional, they are different. That they are not the same, why? Because they just had a spiritual encounter with the living God. They may have no clue what's happening. But you and I do, right? That they are not the same because in being faithful, You bring and you add value to people's lives.

When you look at Jesus and how he treated people, the words in which Jesus said were incredible. When the disciples got worried, what did Jesus say? Oh, you guys are the worst. I can't believe it. How are you worrying? You know, this world, oh, have you seen society today? It's going to hell in a hand basket. You see who's in politics, left side, right side of the aisle. I don't care. It's just all going into the, down the drain. It's just all into the pooper. It just, oh, that's it. Might as well give up. No. What does Jesus say? Jesus says, don't worry. God's got you. He loves you. Don't worry about what you're gonna eat or what you're gonna drink or what you're gonna wear or what tomorrow brings. God loves the birdies and they're taken care of. How much more does He love you? Seek first His kingdom, His righteousness. And when you do that, everything else is gonna be taken care of, right? What did Jesus say to the woman who was caught in adultery? This pretty intense moment in scripture, these righteous people are ready to just stone her 'cause she has sinned very publicly. And Jesus walks in and He puts something in, He draws something or writes something saying, "We don't fully know what it is." But then he says, "Who's without any sin? Go for it." Crowd disperses. Jesus turns to the woman and says, "Where are your accusers?" She goes, "They're gone." So Jesus says to her, "Go, send no more. Live in God's grace and His mercy. Live the life that you know you should be living." He forgives. When Peter decided to deny Jesus, not once, not twice, but three times, what did Jesus say? "Peter, you're canceled. Get out of here. Can't trust you anymore. No, what do you say? Says, "Peter, do you still love me, dude?" He goes, "Yeah." Jesus says, "Okay, go take care of my people. Love them, serve them." Jesus himself specifically tells us, he said, "I came to show the love of my father and I will never leave you and I will never forsake you. And that when Jesus left, He sent the Holy Spirit, He sent somebody even greater. And even a covering, a leader, a perfect comforter to be with us as we take these steps every single day in life, what a blessing. What a blessing. Every interaction with anybody is an opportunity to show the love of God, to build them up, to show them grace, to pour blessing upon them. You have no idea how God might use a single word of encouragement to change someone's life. This is faithfulness to God.

I want to tell you a story that's really important to my life, kind of the reason I'm even in this place here today. Out of college, Laura and I, my wife and I, got married in college and graduated, and I had an opportunity to take a job, one of the few jobs in about the '08 downturn that churches were even hiring. Most of my friends who graduated from school with a pastoral degree just went off into the world to try to start paying for student debt. They didn't get an opportunity. I was fortunate enough to get hired on staff at a church, And we moved there and got settled in. And a couple of weeks into me being a part of the team on staff there, I was leading worship and I was assistant pastor. We started having some conflict. Started having some issues where I wasn't necessarily performing at the level that the pastor wanted. There was a lot of confusion and missed communication with each other. And after eight weeks of being in my first pastoral job, after spending four years studying and writing papers and reading books and doing everything I had, God had called me this place in this moment, the pastor meets me and says, "Hey, it's just not gonna work out, we're gonna move on." And here I am with my wife, thousands of miles away from family, I have a year long lease on a house, and I have to go home and tell my wife I'm no longer employed by this church. And through a crazy, crazy series of events from a pastor who knew a pastor who knew a pastor who knew a pastor, I get a random phone call one day. This is like just a couple days after this had happened. And for whatever reason I answer it. And I had said, "Hello?" And I hear a voice on the other end. He goes, "Hey, this is Pastor John. You don't know who I am, "But I heard about your story. Can I buy you a cup of coffee?" I'm like, "I'm freshly unemployed. Nothing else to do. I'd like a free cup of coffee because I can't afford one right now." So I go and I sit down with this guy and he begins to tell me the story of his dad, who had been in a church for a really, really, really long time, and the church one day decided they didn't want him as their pastor anymore. And they kicked him out of the church. He goes, "I know your story isn't the same." He goes, "But I saw what happened to my dad, and I saw another local pastor come alongside my dad and said, 'Hey, just come sit in church.'" And I remember the coffee shop, I remember the conversation, I remember the pastor sitting there or across the table from me. And he told me, he goes, "You are called to be a pastor. God has placed that on you. And you are too important to be put on the bench right now. You need to stay faithful to God's calling." I was ready to walk away. I was so angry with God. I was like, "How could you take me to this place?" I had all the conversations with God. And he says, "I'm starting a church. I'm not asking you to do anything." He goes, "You and Lauren just come and sit." So we went and we sat. Couple weeks later, he needed some help with stacking chairs. I was like, "I can stack chairs. I got a four-year ministry degree. You betcha I can stack chairs." (audience laughing) I had A+ in that class. So it started with stacking chairs. And it started going to a small group. It started helping with a small group. And then it started helping with some of the teams. Started doing this thing and that thing. And pretty soon I found myself basically on staff working with this pastor pro bono, just being back, falling in love again with the church. you will never know what a opportunity to add value to someone's life may turn into. And one of the great ways to be faithful to God is to be a blessing to others. And that pastor that day and that season of life, even to this day, is an incredible blessing to me and my wife. You may even have a divine appointment on your calendar right now that you don't even know about, but God does. And the question for us will be, will we pre decide that every opportunity and every interaction is an opportunity, a moment to share love to other people and to be a blessing.

The second thing we see from Jesus is that every resource is an opportunity to multiply. Jesus in Matthew 25 tells this parable of a man, a rich man, who went on a journey and he trusted his wealth to his servants. He handed out bags of gold to the first guy, he got five bags of gold. To the second guy, he got two bags of gold. And then to the third guy, he was given one bag of gold. And the first two the five and the three bag bros went out and they risked their gold. They risked their investment and they multiplied it. They multiplied it. They were able to add more to it. And it says in Matthew 25, 21, he says, "His master replied, 'Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful with the few things. I will put you in charge of many things.'" They're saying, "You multiplied what I gave you, and in the kingdom of God, that is faithfulness." The Greek word here for faithfulness is actually pistos, and the definition here I want us to see is a person who shows themselves faithful in the transaction of business, the execution of commands or the discharge of official duties. One of the ways that you can be faithful to God is caring for what God gives to you. God gives you an ugly yard, you make that grass green, right? You make that yard better, that is faithfulness. God blesses you with a clunker of a car, you betcha you have the cleanest clunker on the road today. If God gives you a body, you take care of that body and you steward it.

If you are in business, and I have this conversation all the time, I feel like sometimes in business, maybe you own your business or you're high up in a business or you just work for a business, sometimes those people, because they're in the world of making money, making profit, sometimes they get viewed or they think of themselves as second-class Christians. That well, you know, I'm not a pastor, I'm not really like working for a nonprofit, like I'm not in the in the world to just like give things away that I am less than. Let me tell you this, you being faithful in your business, your job, your work, whatever you put your hands to, you being faithful in that is an incredible, incredible witness to God. Because the world's what? Trying to cut corners. World's trying to get ahead. World's clamoring, climbing over people, pushing them down just to elevate themselves. But for you to say, "I'm gonna have 100% ethical behavior in my job, that is a witness to Jesus. That you're gonna treat your co-workers with kindness. That you're gonna maybe treat those that you're a supervisor over, you're gonna care for them and how you lead them. That is an example that the life that you live, the way that you conduct your business is a massive, massive opportunity to show Christ to those around you. And that just because you're not one of the pastors, it doesn't mean you're less than. We're all called to be witnesses, we're all called to be ambassadors. Your workplace may just look a little different. And that's okay because God has called you there for a purpose and for a reason and a lot of that is to be faithful. And then there was the guy with the one bag. He had the five, the three, the one. He was afraid. I've been that guy. I feel him. I've been anxious. I've been worried. I've tried to be careful not to make a mistake, but what does the master say to to him. He says, "So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. So here is what belongs to you." I was scared. I was nervous. I didn't want to lose any of it. I didn't want somebody to steal it. I wanted to make sure it was still good. You trusted a lot with me, boss. So here you go. His master replied, "You wicked, lazy servant." Here's what I want you to see and to feel in this. The one who multiplied, the master said, "You are faithful." But the one who buried it, he wasn't just lazy. He wasn't just, hey, boss it was a busy week, had all this other paperwork I had to do, like stuff happened with the family. Like, he says he's wicked. If we're going to choose to be faithful, every interaction is an opportunity to add value. Every resource is an opportunity to multiply. And every prompting is an opportunity to obey God.

I love this part in Acts where Paul is really happy with where he's at in Ephesus. He's like locked in with the church, he's doing great. He's like, this is all set, we're golden. But he has this emotional farewell. He says, "Now, compelled by the Spirit, I am going to Jerusalem, not knowing what will happen to me there." This word compelled means that it's kind of like wrapped up or like bound by a rope and kind of pulled in this direction that you can't resist that the spirit says, "I am going to Jerusalem, not knowing what will happen to me there." It's one of those opportunities where you can't explain it, you don't understand it, you don't know the details, but you know is God, you are being drawn in that place. And when you follow Jesus, He will prompt you, He will compel you, and faithfulness is responding when you don't know what will happen. Sometimes we know, sometimes we don't. That job with that church or that pastor, I had to, God actually eight months later asked me to just completely resign from the job without having the next job lined up. And I didn't understand, Lauren, I didn't get it, but we felt like we had to just kind of let go before God would add the next thing. And after we did through a series of crazy events, I get an opportunity for another job and another church, and God takes care of that next step. So good. Other times where God's asked me to step out and to do something, even this last week, I stepped out and did something. I felt like God was saying, and then it just kind of went. Nothing happened. I was like, okay, really thought I was, okay. But the reality is that obedience is our responsibility, but the outcome is God's. Our job is to be responsible. And when he leaves, we say yes and take a step forward, even if it doesn't make sense.

Habakkuk 4:2, we started with this. "But the righteous will live by their faithfulness to God." I haven't always gotten it right. 'Cause I'm up here doesn't mean I've always gotten it right. (chuckles) But I've tried everything I can to be faithful in the small things. 'Cause when you're faithful in the small things, there's this incredible spiritual compounding interest, return on investment that God builds up. And I've seen it in faithful people in the church for generations. I said, "How did you get there?" He was just like, "Every moment of faithfulness." It's just like grains of sand. It's just being thrown onto the beach. And all of a sudden you look down and it's just a shoreline of just sand upon sand upon sand. And I think we will vastly overestimate what we can get done in a season. Well, thank God I'm gonna fix this. I'm gonna fix my marriage. I'm gonna fix my finances. God, 2024, like this is the year it's gonna be done. But I think we will also underestimate the faithfulness of God in a lifetime. That we will underestimate what God can do when we are faithful in little things time after time after time again. Every interaction is an opportunity to add value with relationships and people. Every resource is an opportunity to multiply. How do we steward with what God has blessed us with? and every prompting is an opportunity to obey God. Just do it. Obedience is our responsibility, the outcome is God's. We just have to be faithful. That's your life, to be faithful to God.

Pray with me. we thank you for this morning. God, we are so grateful for your faithfulness. Where you, since the beginning of time and the broken relationship in the Garden, God, you started the world on a path towards redemption and that even in the midst of that, when all hope seems lost, you, God, were still working a plan to make the world right once again. And when you sent Jesus, You fixed the biggest problem that we had in our life and you took care of us and you reached down and you said, "I love you." It's going to be okay. Jesus, we're so grateful that you are so faithful to us. God, may we in return be faithful in the little things so that we may then have opportunities to be faithful in the big things when the time comes, when you prompt us to step out. God, as we look forward to this next week for the divine appointments you have on our calendar already, God, may we be obedient even if we don't know the outcome. We thank you, Jesus. We praise you. We love you. We worship you today. Everybody said, "Amen."

Pre-Decide: Part 5

Pre-Decide: Part 5 - I AM GENEROUS

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

We are continuing in our series that we kicked off about five or six weeks ago called Pre-Decide. And the premise and the big idea of this series is that we would, before we're placed in any situation, pre-decide a particular action that we're gonna take. And we've been going through a couple different of these. We've talked about being ready, consistent, devoted, generous, faithful, and a finisher. And today I'm excited to kinda jump into something that not everybody is necessarily excited to talk about in the church, but it's something that we need to talk about and it's something that Jesus really commanded us. I read an article back in 2007, I know the good old days, right? '07, anybody remember '07? Yeah, okay, just me, okay. This was before Instagram, this was before like Netflix originals, this was before like Venmo and Cash App. I mean, how did we survive? Like honestly, like I don't even know how we lived. But in 2007, there was a study that was done that you on average every day were exposed to about 5,000 ads, 5,000 advertisements, whether that was in '07, do they have cell phones? Yeah, okay, cell phone, maybe the interwebs, your dial-up, your AOL chat messenger. Maybe it was a billboard, old school, right? The ones that aren't digital, but like the ones, maybe the ones that like rotated and like they were like three billboards in one, no? Okay, I'm a nerd. But you were exposed to over 5,000 ads every single day. Fast forward to now, 2024. I know everybody's like, huh. You are on average exposed to double that. Over 10,000 ads every single day. You look at, you scroll past, you try to block on your web browser. Everything that you do has an ad, right? Whether you're in an app, you're on social media, you're trying to read a blog to get that perfect recipe. Maybe you're watching an influencer on Google, you read a news article, YouTube videos. Anybody else just really YouTube? You're like, just get me to the video. Like I don't need like some, and they start stacking up. You get like skip one, skip two, skip. I'm like, how long is it? These ads are gonna be longer than the 30 second video that I was trying to watch on YouTube. But this is really bad news. This is really bad news because that study in 2007 actually told us that the more ads that we see, the more miserable that we are. I'm just here to bring hope and excitement to you in your life today, right? But the reality is that the more ads we see, the more miserable we are, why? because this ad wants to convince you and tell you that you don't have the perfect life, that you're missing out. You don't have what you need. And let me tell you today, ladies and gentlemen, what you need. I feel like I'm in my own infomercial right now in front of you guys. But the more ads that we see ad-plaked us to this place where we're just miserable. And the only way that these ads tell us and the world tells us to get happy is to get, get, get, accumulate, acquire, hoard in, hold onto it, have spares, have extras, why? Because then at that point, then you'll be happy that you have to have the new iPhone. You gotta have your favorite brand of shoes. You gotta have that purse. Ladies, you gotta have the Lulu leggings, right? I don't know, I just been told that that's where it's at, but we're told that it is more blessed to get. It is more blessed to acquire, it's more blessed to accumulate, and the world is yelling at us every single day, 10,000 times, that it is more blessed to get.

But Jesus has something different to say about that. I love what he says in Acts 20 verse 35. Jesus says, "It is more blessed to give than to receive." This word, the original word here actually means more blessed, doubly blessed, or some might translate it or look at it in the realm of you're happier, you're more generous, you're more joyful when you give, you're more fulfilled when you give, You're more blessed when you give than when you receive. And I think for the most part, we know this, right? We know this kind of deep down inside and we wanna give more. We wanna be able to help people. We wanna be able to take care of our friends and our family and to love them in a way of meeting a practical need. But the reality is that a lot of us are in a place where we just feel that we can't do it right now. Inflation is through the roof. It is bonkers out there, it seems like, what it costs to just... I was talking to my wife about just going and getting a cheeseburger the other night, and we were just like, "$15? Excuse me? When did that happen?" We're like, "No, we'll have a sandwich at home. Thank you very much." But it's like this crazy space that we live in where we want to give, we want to be generous with everything we have but we feel that we just we can't I want to share today and not an infomercial style but to share some principles where you and I can become irrationally generous if you were writing anything down this morning you want to write something out if you want to write today's title for the talk would be when you stop holding back. Pray with me. Jesus, we thank you for this morning. God, we are grateful to be here in your presence. God, we continue to invite you into this space. God, lead me with your words from your scripture, not what Pastor Chris has to say or what Pastor Chris thinks, but God, what you think and how you view generosity even in our world today in this moment in 2024. We thank you, Jesus. Amen. If you've been with us, we've been talking about this pre-decided thing, and specifically we've had this saying that we have, we can put this on the screen, that says when we're faced with this situation, we have pre-decided to take a specific action. We are pre-deciding even before we're in the moment, even before when we're looking at this face to face, we have pre-decided a specific action that we are going to take. We're not gonna let our emotions drive us, we're seeking God, we're going to Him, we've thought about it, we've prayed about it, we're trying to pre-decide in a very specific situation area. And we talked about six of these. And we had these stickers we gave away a couple of weeks ago if you didn't get one or you want a second one to put somewhere, they're on the table on the way out, next to hand sanitizer. And we would love for you to have one of these to have with you where your water bottle, you can put in your car, put it on your mirror, kind of wherever you want to be reminded of these statements of who we are. And I wanna say these together with us. We can bring this on the screen. Talking about being, I am ready. Say it with me, I am. - Ready. - Oh yeah, let's go. It's talking about being, I am consistent. I am. - Consistent. - Let's go. Talking about I am devoted. Pastor Andre shared with us last week, I am devoted.

Today we're gonna talk about being I am generous. I am faithful and I am a finisher. This is what we are talking about. This is who Jesus has called us to live as Christians, not only for the world around us, but for one another, and for what we would call our Spring Valley family, our church family, for each other, for our family family, for our neighbors, for our community, for our world. This is who Jesus called us to. And if we say we are a follower of Jesus, this is who he says that we are. So we are pre deciding, choosing ahead of time by God's grace that today talking about we will be more blessed by being generous and we are pre deciding to do so. Why? Why does any of this matter? Why does any of this matter? That no one ever accidentally becomes irrationally generous. Nobody just by chance stumbles into tithing or giving offerings or paying rent for someone who's need or buying groceries for someone who can't afford it or funding ministries or missions trips or having so much fun with tithing that they start with 10% and then go to 12, and then to 15 and 20, 25%, and then accidentally give away almost everything to God, more and more and more, and allowing him to be blessed, and to leave our kids an inheritance to our children, to our children, our children. No one ever stumbles into irrational generosity. It doesn't happen. And we tend to think that we will be generous when the time comes. that we will be generous, but I just can't right now. And we get in this circle of thought that when I have more, I'll give more, right? When, you know, God, when I just get that next pay raise, when I get that next bump at work, God, I'm all in on generosity. I am all yours, God. When I finally get that mortgage payment taken care of and I get the utility bills paid, I go, then God, you know what? I am generous. I am all of yours. You can have everything that I have when I get here. But I want you to understand that this isn't how generous people think. This isn't their thought process. Generosity isn't about what we have or don't have. It's about our heart. Generosity is about our heart. How do we know this? Well, we've seen some poor people who are crazy stingy, right? We've seen rich people who have it set for life, who you can't get a 20 spot out of them. And then on the other side, we've seen poor people who have literally nothing that just give it away. That just absolutely go, it's all yours, God. It's not much, it's all yours. And then we also see really, really rich people, philanthropists, who are incredible and change the world with what they have been blessed with. Generosity isn't something we just stumble into.

There's a story in Luke chapter 12, Jesus tells that illustrates this really, really well. And there's this rich guy who is getting richer, and then he has this incredible harvest. Okay, so farming terms, probably us city people don't get that. But this dude just basically just hit the jackpot, okay? We'll say that. He is loaded. And he probably, at one point, said, "Oh, what am I gonna do with all of this? Man, I have so much more than what I can store. the harvest, it's a grain, they gotta store it or it goes bad, they gotta keep it safe. Gotta keep it dry, gotta keep animals out of it, anything from eating, they gotta protect it. And so this rich guy, he's like, man, what am I gonna do? And I would venture to say, because I think each of us would be similar, that this rich dude at one point or another said, when I have more, I will give more. But what happens? We read this in Luke chapter 12, he said, "Then he said, I know, "I'll tear down my barns and build bigger ones. "Then I'll have enough room to store all my wheat "and other goods. "And I'll sit back and say to myself, my friend, "you have enough stored away for years to come. "Now take it easy, eat, drink, and be merry." Similar story, right? Written over 2000 years ago, but still rings so true to today. That this story of, when I get more, I'm gonna, God, when I have that harvest, when it comes in, baby, oh man, I'm bringing it to the church, we're gonna celebrate. I'm sending it to my buddy who's a missionary overseas. I'm gonna fund this, I'm gonna take care of this. I'm gonna take care of my neighbor's mortgage. I'm gonna take care of this rent over there. I'm getting groceries for the lady down the street who's a single mom. Like I am all in God when this harvest comes in. But what happened? His heart was revealed. And the reality is, I'm sorry, this one's gonna hurt. More money just makes more of what you already are. That one hurt. Money doesn't change who we are, it just reveals maybe our true self deep down inside. And that is why if you want to be generous, which I think we all do, when we have more, we have to learn to be generous when we have less. We have to learn now and we have to pre-decide to be generous even if we have less than what we think to be generous.

Giving is not just something that we do, it's an identity of who we are. In my, for some of you who would look at me, say my short time here on earth, other yous would look at me and say that old dude up front who's been around since dirt, In my life, I will say that I've seen two really big qualities of generous people. Whether in the church, I know a lot of generous people who have nothing to do with God in the church and they're incredibly generous. They make some Christians look really bad. Wherever they are on the spectrum, they are a generous person. Two things I constantly see from them. and the first of which is generous people plan to be generous. Generous people plan to be generous. You might think, I'll say this, and I felt like this for a long, long time, that being generous was spontaneous. You saw somebody on the side of the road and you're like, "Hey, here's a five," or, "Hey, here's my lunch," or you went and got food for them and brought them food. Maybe it's buying the meal or the coffee or whatever for the person behind us in drive-through, right? Or maybe it was, you would see these poor, poor puppies in cages, and you would start to hear Sarah McLachlan singing. That they have to free the puppies. We have to, they're so sad. And so then maybe you get to, You go down and you give some money to the local animal shelter, or you go do an adoption day, or you bring home a new family member, four-legged friend. But we think that that's generosity, but I wanna tell you today, that's not, that's giving. And that's fantastic, it's wonderful. And I wanna tell you, don't stop doing that. That is great, great stuff. We should be giving people. But what is the difference between giving and generosity is that generous people don't have to be guilted into giving. Generous people don't need to be inspired to give. Generous people are not reactive. Does that make sense? Generous people, they don't give whenever there's just a need. They don't give when they have something extra. They don't give when they're prompted to, but generous people actually have a plan. And scripture tells us this very clearly in Isaiah 32, chapter eight, it says, "But generous people plan "to do what is generous." Generous people plan. Generous people pre-decide. Generous people plan to do what is generous, and they stand firm in their generosity. They stand firm, I think stand firm as in maybe a stance where you're not gonna get knocked over, but they plan to be generous and they stand firm in that. Giving is not what I do. Generosity is who I am. And we have to plan to be generous. Pre-decide to be generous. See, what's funny about this is that all people have a plan for finances. All people have a plan for finances. Some, you might say, "Hey, pastor, no." No, I really don't. I really don't have a plan. You have a plan. Is there ever something that you really, really wanted? Like really wanted? You get strategic real fast, right? You start doing research, who's got the best price? Is it free shipping or not? Are they charging tax or not? Can I get a coupon? Can I get a discount? Do I buy it used, but still has maybe a couple of year warranty, so it may last a little bit, or do I buy it locally, so that I'm not paying for shipping, I'm not paying for taxes, a cash transaction. Where do I have the cash? Do I have the cash? I can get the cash. Wait a minute, okay, now I gotta meet this person. You're messaging in Facebook marketplace, offer up. Oh, then all of a sudden Amazon, boom, it's on sale. Oh my gosh, add $5 clip coupon. It's the word of the Lord. He has spoken to me. We have had it, here it is. Just me? Okay. Generous people don't plan to consume. Generous people plan to give. And when we become generous by nature, you are strategically and prayerfully designing your life around generosity. It's not something you do as a reaction. It is a strategy, it's a mindset. When we think differently, you sit down and you think, man, how can I bless somebody? How can I take what God has given me and make an even greater difference? How can I maximize what I have? How can I be a blessing to people around me?

Here's the key, it's not just spontaneous. Maybe it is, but not, certainly not all the time. That's not how it works. It's not emotional, strategic. It's not random, it's intentional. And along with our series, we are pre deciding before in the moment that we will be generous. So you might say, I'm just not a planner. It may not be a good plan that you have, may not be written down, but there's a plan. I'll show you kind of what I'm talking about today. I have the circle illustration I wanna show us. That for the most of us, the reality is where we are is we spend more than we make. God supplies us, God increases us, whether that's an income or an allowance or something special we get in our lives every single month or maybe quarterly, I don't know, it comes in and we probably most likely spend more than we make. But then that puts us in a really bad place because then we start lacking margin. And we don't have any wiggle room with where we're at financially. And then what does that cause us to do? It starts bringing worry into our life. And then to combat the worry, we go and have retail therapy and we spend more than we make and then we're lacking margin, and then we worry more, and then we spend more than we make, and then we lack margin. You guys kind of get the picture of this. This is not a money problem. It's a spiritual problem. Everybody like super excited they came to church today. Like, yeah! It's a spiritual problem. I'm preaching to myself up here by the way, this is hard. We are trusting in things rather than putting our faith in God. And what happens is that generous people, they break the cycle. Not accidentally, not by happenstance, not by just falling into it, but intentionally, strategically, pre-deciding with a plan. We break the cycle by choosing God first. Jesus said this, what did he say? He said, "Seek first the kingdom of God "and his righteousness, "and then all things, everything else, "will be added to you." We don't seek the shoes, we don't seek the countertops, we don't seek the new car, we don't seek the new watch, but we seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. We put Him first, then everything else will be added. We seek God first.

There's actually a principle in scripture that talks about this very, very powerful, important, life-changing thing, and it's called a tithe. Maybe you guys have heard of it, maybe you haven't, but we find this in Malachi. And it says in Malachi 3.10, "Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, "that there may be food in my house." What is a tithe? It's not a word that's typically used in society. It actually comes from the Hebrew meaning masser, which means 10%. And we see this in scripture as to bring 10% of what God has blessed you and me with back to him as an act of worship that there may be food in God's house. Confession, first time I heard about some of this, I was becoming a kid and I'd started mowing lawns and I started earning some money from family members and doing some yard work. And I first heard about this idea and I was like, Wait, what? A tithe? 10%? That is way too much. That's ridiculous. I can't afford to do that. God, you don't understand, I got things I need to buy. I got basketball shoes I need. I got the Backstreet Boys CD I need. I got the Pokemon cards. They just dropped. Like, God, you just don't understand. In order to do that, God, okay, I would have to completely rearrange my entire life, all of my priorities, everything that I have chosen to do, and put you, God, first. It's almost like he knew. It's almost like he knew that this would be a place where I would have to change my priorities, I would have to put him first, I'd have to fully trust him, I'd have to worship him with everything that I had, I'd have to step into a place that is completely uncomfortable, a place that I didn't like, a place that meant I probably had less, a place that rearranged all of my priorities, every single thing that I had focused on my mind, on my wishlist, I was working towards, it was almost like he could see the future. God can, by the way, just letting you know that.

God put us in this place You know what he said? Test me. This is the only place in the entire Bible where God says, I dare you. I double dog dare you. Put me to the test, bro. Test me in this. Says the Lord Almighty. and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be enough room to store it. If you put him first, God says, "See if I'll take care of you." See what happens. Now you might say, hey, hey, hey, Chris, let's, eh, careful here. It kind of sounds like a little tell the evangelist prosperity gospel here. If you give money to the church, then you will be rich. What I'm talking about today is not prosperity gospel. What I'm talking about today is the generosity gospel. And Jesus, God himself first did that, right? John 3:16, "For God so loved the world that He gave." God was the first one that was generous. God was the first one that poured out. God was the first one who blessed us, even when we did not deserve it whatsoever. God was the one who first gave, and this is the difference. And when you and I start to recognize giving, we begin to see that it is more blessed to give than it is to receive. And it breaks the cycle, right? It puts you into this new cycle. And it says this, when God supplies, we give, we trust him. We go, God, don't make no sense. My calculator on my phone, it doesn't add up, God, you don't get it. But then what happens? God blesses. And we go, wait, wait, wait a minute. I did this math. I'm not like the most brilliant person, I'm a math guy, I like numbers, and my math was not math in God. But then you took care of it, somehow. You took care of it. And then that builds our faith. And then it builds our faith and we go, okay God, you did this last time. Maybe we can do it again. And we give. And God blesses. And it builds our faith. And we give and God blesses and it builds our faith and it builds the faith of those around us. And then they see us giving and they go, Wait, how are you doing that? And you're like, I don't know, it's God, but I'm still giving. And God continues to bless and it builds faith and we keep giving. This faith that builds replaces the worry in our life. It pushes back those feelings of going, God, I'm living paycheck to paycheck. I don't get this. I got this stuff coming in. I don't understand what's going on. God, I need you. I'm stressed, I'm anxious, I'm worried. I don't know what the interest rate from the feds, what they're gonna say next month. I don't know what's gonna happen this summer with the housing market. God, I don't understand if they're laying people off at work, God, you don't understand. I just, you, ah, ah, ah, ah. And this faith that starts to build just pushes all of this stuff out. and we start living in this generous place. And it doesn't have to be a lot. If there's anything that you wanna take away with this morning, it's being generous doesn't mean it has to be a lot. Being generous doesn't mean we have to have our name on a hospital or on a plaque in a hallway somewhere or for people to see it and to be recognized. My grandparents were an incredible example of this. They would constantly just bring money to the church and drop it off, and they told the pastor, "You know who needs it this month." And every time they would show up, the pastor would look at him and go, "You have no idea. "We just had somebody call. "They need this much money, "and you just handed it to me in an envelope." That's God. That is generosity.

It's a mindset that changes who we are when we put God first, but we have to pre-decide. It's not just giving when it's convenient. It's not just giving when you might have some leftover, But we do it and we give God our first and our best, and we trust him to do what he's gonna do with the rest of it. We pre-decide to put him first. And I would say that it starts with a tie, that it starts with a decision to say, God, this is yours, but it doesn't stop there. There's a lot of people I know in the church, not in this church, my other old churches that nobody just, you just don't talk about it. That's a joke, it's okay. They were good churches. But I've met people in the church, they're like, "Hey, pastor, 10%, I'm in, buddy. Just wanna let you know, check the box. God's happy with me." And I would challenge them. I was like, "Dude, you're not being generous. Like, I appreciate it. You're helping keep lights on and ministry going and coffee and food on Sundays. Like, hey, awesome, thank you. Still got some hard work, man. This isn't an end all be all, boop, there we go, I'm done. That's where we start, that's like step one in our plan of being generous, but we don't stop there and we're not accidental about it. I heard this story one time of a guy who literally has in his monthly budget 50 bucks. And he gets paid, sets the 50 aside, and he says, "God, you know this month where this is going. "I don't know yet, but you know." And he goes throughout his day. "Hey God, you got anybody in mind yet?" "Hey God, what?" Every single month, God has a place for that $50. But he pre-decides. This isn't like, "Hey God, January 31st down here on earth. "Got 27 bucks in the checking account, where do you want this to go, God?" Pre-decide, put it in the budget. There's no accident, it's not planned spontaneity. You have pre-decided that this dude is gonna bless somebody with 50 bucks every single month. I've heard stories of people who have decided to increase 1% every year. So what does that look like? Well, it looks like they start one year at 10% and then it's 11, it's 12, it's 13, it's 14, 15. But they pre decided that this is what they're going to do with what God has blessed them with. And they've done some incredible, incredible generous things in their life. I know somebody who was a small business owner. And he talked to me and he was like, "Hey, can I give from my business to the church?" And I was like, "Totally, bro, absolutely." He goes, "I didn't know that. "I didn't know if like the whole tithe thing "was just like my income." Or I was like, "Dude, if you're feeling led "by the Holy Spirit to give through your business, "then do that." Well, say this, the caveat, business blew up overnight. I've also heard stories of people with business plans to get to a point where they are giving away 50% of their profit every single year to world missions. To fighting hunger around the globe, to ending diseases that we don't even have to think about in America, to changing the trajectory of cultures around the globe, people that have way less than anything we do.

That doesn't happen by accident. Now we probably don't do that tomorrow, but it takes strategy, it takes planning, it takes thinking, it takes pre-deciding what you're going to do to be generous. The other thing that I see when we close from generous people is that generous people always round up. Generous people always round up. What do I mean by this? I heard a story one time of some believers. And they had gone to a restaurant to have a meal. And the server knew who they were. The server hated God, the server hated the church, the server hated everything to do about Christian, server just utterly despised everything. And she goes, here's my chance. Gives them the most horrible service that they have ever received in their life. She goes, I'm gonna stick it to them. It comes time for the bill. And they feel led by the Holy Spirit for some reason. I mean, they were talking, "There's no way we're going to tip this gal. We're not paying her anything. We're just doing a fat goose egg under tip." I'm getting food comped. But the Holy Spirit's tugging their hearts saying, "You got to pay. You got to tip. You need to round up." round up. And they're like, oh, okay, God, that's what I gotta do. And they tithe, or not tithe, tip, round up, minimal to go, hey, God, yeah, I got you, I got you. Here we go. And she was floored. Fast forward a couple years later, she hits a point of just rock bottom in her life. And she goes, "You know who I need to go see? "Those Christian people who blessed me "when I had done absolutely nothing to be blessed by them, "and they rounded up." They rounded up. She knew what she had done. She knew how she had treated them. She knew that she was undeserving of anything, and fully expecting no tip or anything, whatever, just to be like, see, told you, feel that fire. God flipped that upside down, she went to church, she found the saving message of Jesus Christ and she's living for God. Generous people always round up.

Proverbs 21:26 says, "All day long, the lazy, he, the selfish craves and craves, but the righteous gives and does not hold back." Generous people round up. We see this all over scripture. I love this, real quick. See this all over scripture. First thing I will say, the Good Samaritan. You guys heard that story maybe? If you've been in church, you're Good Samaritan. This dude coming along the road, see this guy who just got beat up, he got jumped, he got everything stolen from him. He got just the living daylights beat out of him. It's basically moments from dying. Good Samaritan, bandages him up, says, "Hey, we're taking you to town. "We're gonna get you well." Takes him to basically a hospital in the inn and basically says, you gotta take care of this guy, you gotta take care of, and he says this in Luke 10:35. He says, "The next day, he being the good Samaritan "handed the innkeeper two silver coins, "telling him, take care of this man. "If his bill runs higher than this, "I'll pay you the next time I'm here." Good Samaritan bro could have just been like, hey, bandaged you up on the road, good luck, peace. He bandaged him up, picked him up, took him to town, Hey, he could have just dropped him at the doorstep of the inn and said, "Hey, innkeeper, "somebody out here, see ya," and rolled. But he takes in there, he pays the bill and then gives his word, "Hey, if anything else comes up, "it's on this dude." No, he says, "If anything else comes up, I'm good for it. "Next time I'm in town, tell me the bill, "I will take care of it." Generous people round up. Anybody remember Zacchaeus? Zacchaeus was a wee little man A wee little man was he Okay, some of you are like, who is that? It's okay. It's like early 2000s, late 90s church. It's okay. But Zacchaeus, this short little dude, he climbs up in a tree so he can see this guy, Jesus, walking on the road, and he's like, I wanna see who this dude is. And Jesus comes along and says, hey, Zacchaeus, I'm coming to your house for dinner. What you making? And the dude basically falls out of the tree in shock. And it's like, are you okay? Okay, cool, let's go to your house. He's like, ah, he fell on the tree, bro. No, but seriously, he goes to his house and he's having dinner with him. And this guy was the worst of the worst. He was a crook, he was a swindler, he was a manipulator, he stole money from people, he was taking taxes, but then he was taking his taxes, and then his friends' taxes, And then his friend's tax is on top, really he was taking it all, but he was taking all this extra tax stuff, and Jesus shows up in his life and radically changes him. And he says what? In verse, Luke 19, verse eight, he says, "If I've cheated anybody out of everything," newsflash, he cheated everybody out of everything, "I will pay back four times the amount." That's pretty generous. That is pretty generous.

Jesus himself, he tells us, he says, "Anybody demands your shirt, "give them your really cool jacket too." If somebody says, "Hey, go a mile with me, round up, go too." Jesus says, "Generous people round up." It's not what you're not doing, We're just not randomly giving. We're not just waiting until we have more. We are generous people who make a plan and round up. My wife, amazing, she's incredible. You haven't met her, she's really, really cool. She came up with this idea somewhere of creating these pre-made packs of stuff for people who are unhoused. And it has like deodorant and socks. And I think there was like a beanie in there and there was like a Starbucks gift card and all this stuff. And because we were driving around and our girls kept saying, "Hey, can we help this person?" It was just like, "Sorry, we have a water bottle." We hand them a water bottle and the girls were like, "That was cool! We gotta do this more. And so then we started having water bottles and it was just like, we didn't have enough water bottles. And then we came, my wife found this idea. She came probably with herself, she's brilliant, to make these packs that have all this stuff in it ready to go. And we would call them our bless packs. I think that's the term. But we would have them in the car ready to go. So when we pulled up next to them, one of the girls was like, "Hey, let's do a bless pack from the back of the van." And one was like, "Okay, Lauren, okay." And we would hand it to them. This incredible, incredible, and they, seven bucks maybe? A pack? 'Cause the Starbucks gift card? But it was just something so simple and so easy, but we had to pre-plan. Does it take some time? Yeah, does it take some effort? Yeah, you gotta go to the store, you gotta buy some stuff, you gotta put some, but that generosity in a practical way for someone.

There was another time I was working at Starbucks in college. Lauren and I were just early married, and we were living paycheck to paycheck. And we were trying to do the tithing thing, and every month or so we'd try to get there. Sometimes we didn't make it. But I had a coworker of mine who was a single mom. She had gone through a really ugly divorce, and she was living at home with like six kids. And a couple of them were in high school, and we were talking one time, she was my shift manager, and we were talking and she's like, I just, I don't know what I'm gonna do. I was like, what do you mean? She goes, it's a couple days before payday and we are literally out of food. She goes, I got nothing. She goes, I think the kids might be able to get something at school. She goes, but I really don't know what I'm gonna do. And we were like, okay, what can like, they're like, no, it's nasty, but here's a bunch of old muffins and some breakfast sandwiches, and here's a gallon of milk. We'll just turn a blind eye. And she had never asked for anything ever. And so I go home and I can't stop thinking about it. Can't stop thinking about it. And God's like, you gotta do something, bro. You gotta do something. I'm like, I don't wanna do it. So I talked to my wife, Laura, and I'm like, this is what's going on. And she goes, "We're going to the store." I was like, "What do you mean?" She's like, "We don't have the money." She's like, "Yeah, we do." She's like, "We're going to the store." And I was like, "Okay." And it was a couple of days before our payday, and we were looking at our fridge, and we were going, "Okay, God." And one time she turned to me, she goes, "We have to do something." And I was like, "Okay." So we went to the store, and we filled the cart, and we checked out. And we went to their house and we doorbell ditched them with a load of groceries. The math didn't math. God took care of the bill. It wasn't Lorna me. God took care of the bill. There was enough. We made it to payday. And then I had that next shift with her at work. And she was like, I gotta tell you a story. And she was in tears. She was like, I don't know who it was, or how it happened. She goes, there was just enough food. Young married couple buying for a family of six. We had no idea who could buy it. And I was like, man, that's incredible. And she was like, "I don't understand." I was like, "Probably not meant to understand, "but just say thanks God." And she goes, "Oh yeah, I've been talking to God "like I've never been talking to God these last 48 hours.”

Being generous is a heart, attitude, mindset change. It's not what you give. Being generous is who you are, and this is who God has called us to. If you want to be more generous when you have more, learn to be generous when you have less. This isn't, it wasn't like that day after Lauren and I did that, like we never struggled with generosity in our life. No. It is a constant battle and struggle. But when we seek God first, and we trust Him with everything that we have, He will take the portion that is left over, and it will go further than you could ever have best plans for the whole. It's the only thing I could tell you that. And I know generous people in this church that say the exact same thing. It's like we started just being generous. We didn't understand, it didn't make sense, and it just happened. But you have to pre-decide. We're not waiting till later. not making excuses of why we can't. We stand firm in our plan of generosity, pre-deciding, rounding up, because we serve a God who went above and beyond and was the most generous, who pre-decided to send his son to take care of everything for us as the ultimate gift. our choice is to then share from that generosity.

Pray with me. Jesus, we thank you for today. God, we thank you for your generosity of the rain outside, even this moment. God, you are so caring and loving. We are so incredibly grateful. And so God, I pray for us as we go from this place today that we would start maybe having some hard conversations, God, of where do you want us to give? Where do you want us to be generous? How do you want us to handle the increase, God, that you have given to us? Jesus, may we be people as Christ's followers who are identified as generous people, not because of the amount that we give, but because of how we care and we love for those around us, God. May we pre-decide, may we pre-choose to trust that you're gonna be the one who's gonna take care of it. Give us eyes to see, give us the strength to plan strategically to be generous. God, be with us as we go from this place. We love you, we praise you, we thank you for who you are. We love you, Jesus. Amen.

Pre-Decide: Part 4

Pre-Decide: Part 4 - I AM DEVOTED

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

I wanted to ask this as we jump into our sermon this morning. I want to ask this. Have you ever felt disappointed in life? Have you thought, man, by this time in life, I thought I would have more? I thought my life would look different. Maybe it's your job, your car, your living situation. Have you ever just thought, man, I thought this would be better? Or I thought maybe by this point in life, I thought I'd be doing something more significant. Maybe you've gotten to the place where you've gotten those things. You've got what you wanted. you've accomplished whatever you set out to do, and then you start wondering, "Is this all there is? Is there anything more to life? Is this all worth it?" And so that question of, "Is there anything more after getting everything that I wanted here on Earth, the spoil..." Oh, the answer is spoiler, yes, there is more. There's absolutely more. And that's what we're going to talk about this morning, about how when we live our lives, we should revolve around getting closer to God. We're gonna talk about pre-deciding, about getting closer to God. Would you pray with me one more time? God, thank you again for our morning together so far. We pray that through your word, we would be encouraged and empowered. And God, that we'd be drawn closer to you. Our desire this morning is to learn more about you so after we leave our time together, that we could go out and be your representatives in this world. So we give you all the glory and honor. We pray this in your name. Amen.

Alright, so again we're in our series Predecide, and we're talking about how when we predecide, those decisions that we make can positively affect the direction of our lives. And the direction is determined by the quality of our decisions. We talked about how when we get into challenging situations that inevitably come in life, those stressful and difficult moments, we're not the best decision makers in those moments. And so we want to, instead of waiting for those challenges, we want to pre-decide everything beforehand as much as possible. We're going to pre-decide now. We're going to pre-decide how to best follow God and honor God in whatever comes up. And so we have this situation that we've been going through which is, when faced with whatever you're - fill in the blank for you - whatever you're going through, whatever you foresee happening in your life, you're going to pre-decide, follow, you're going to make a decision to say, "When this happens, I want to be ready. I'm gonna honor God, I'm gonna live like Jesus through that situation by doing the following. So far we've talked about being ready. You guys ready to do this? We're getting this every week now, you ready? So say, "I am ready." I am ready, good. I am consistent. I am consistent. Yes, you guys are, good. And so today we're talking about devotion. With God's help, we can be devoted in all that we do. And we're not just talking about being devoted in our eating habits or our spending hats or our workout regimen. But as Christians, we need to know who we're devoted to, what it means to be devoted, and how we live a devoted life, and also when do we live this devoted life. It's the classic who, what, how, when. We covered the why last week, and so if you don't remember that, go ahead and listen to that sermon last week. But let's go ahead and start with the who. As for the who, as followers of Jesus, this one might be pretty obvious. We are devoted to Christ. We are fully devoted followers. If you are a Christian, you are a fully devoted follower to Jesus.

Let's go ahead and read Matthew 6. This is Jesus talking, and he says in verse 33, "But seek first His kingdom, God's kingdom, and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well." Jesus is telling us to seek God first. When we're devoted to God, we're devoted to His kingdom, to His way of life, then we will experience the truest and fullest, the deepest sense of fulfillment. When we live according to Jesus, then this question of "Is there anything more than this on earth?" we don't even have to ask that question, because we'll experience true fulfillment living the way that God intended us to live. No matter what our worldly circumstances are, as great or as challenging as they might be, seeking first the kingdom of God is for everyone. So from this, this is going to be our umbrella theme for today, is we want to seek first the one who matters most. We want to seek first the one who matters most. Paul had his own way of saying this in Philippians 1:21, he says, "For to me," this is Paul speaking, "For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain." All this life, all that I do is for him. I want to seek him in everything. Jesus is looking for and truly demands all of our devotion. As much as we may love other things in our life, our spouse, our children, our family, our best friends, our job, our money, whatever situation we're in, we may love that. But first and foremost, we must be fully devoted to God. That's the who. All right, so now what does it mean to be devoted to Jesus? Well, the disciples do a great job of showing us what that looks like. I want to give you the setting here. We're going to be in Acts. Jesus has spent three years with his disciples, mostly the twelve, but there's other followers of him. And then as we know, Jesus died on the cross, and he's buried, and then three days later, he is raised from the grave, and that's when we celebrate Easter. And then when he's raised, he's 40 more days with the disciples. And then he ascends into heaven to be back with the Father, and he leaves the disciples in charge of what he had begun. He had been prepping them, He'd been training them, teaching them, discipling them. And so what do the followers of Jesus do? Well, they continue the work of Jesus, and the early church comes to life. And we read this in Acts 2:42, verse 42, it says, "They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship and to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles.”

So the early believers, they devoted themselves to the teaching, which is the reading of God's Word, Jesus's interpretation of the Old Testament, they were learning God's instructions for humanity. Also fellowship, just spending time with each other, intentional time with each other, the body of Christ, so whenever they had their church services to throughout the week, just fellowship with each other. It says the breaking of bread, meals, communion, specifically communion, remembering, taking time to remember what Jesus had done on the cross, and also hoping in what he was going to do in the future. And they did this out of obedience to Jesus' instruction at the Last Supper, and then also the prayers. This is communing and talking and listening with God, listening for God. This could be in a communal setting, but also just the daily individual time spent in prayer. This is what devotion to Jesus looks like. And while some of these things might look different over the years, over the centuries, church, we're still doing this today. All these things. This is what we devote ourselves to. Teaching. Well, we have our Sunday sermons, we have our Bible studies, community groups. Fellowship. We have things like Morning Blend, family meals, community groups. hanging out with each other outside of church, breaking bread when we do our communion Sundays, anytime we're sharing a meal with each other, and then prayers, we pray in our service, we pray for each other through those monthly emails that go out of how we can be praying for each other. We pray, hopefully you're praying on your own. So followers of Jesus today are still devoting themselves to these things. The word here for devoted in the Greek conveys this, that their devotion is ongoing. It continues, they were continually devoted. And so we see from the disciples, the followers of Jesus, they had one thing on their mind, and it's this ongoing pursuit of Jesus. Now, that was the disciples back then, the early church.

What would a book about today's Christians sound like? Or at least a book about those who call themselves Christians today? What would the world describe Christians as today? If we were brutally honest, it might sound something like this. Christians today are devoted to themselves, continually and passionately pursuing a self-centered life of comfort and ease. Christians in the year 2024 wanted to be liked, they wanted to be comfortable, adored. They want to finish school, have a job they love, marry someone, have a nice house, travel the world, and at the end of their life go to heaven. Now if you didn't like the sound of that, good. That's not what we should be known for. Those things in and of themselves aren't bad, but are they the first thing that we are pursuing in life? Are they what we are devoting ourselves to the most? It should make us think and reflect, Are we devoting ourselves fully to Jesus? Are we seeking first the one who matters most? Would people ask this question to yourself, would people in your life identify your love in pursuit of Jesus first and foremost as a characteristic of who you are? If so, great, good job. Keep living in the spirit and if there was any conviction through the spirit then bring that forward to God. Say, "God, how do I change this?" How do I change being known from this to being known by you? We today as followers of Jesus can take our cue from those early disciples. We need to have an ongoing pursuit of Christ and have one thing on the forefront of our minds before anything else, and that's following Jesus.

Pastor Groeschel has an example that I think is really helpful. We're going to do it today. So I have a tape measure here. I hope this works. I've tested this. So I'm going to measure out-- OK, we're going a long ways-- 156-- OK, right here. Did I do it? Stay. Stay. Uh-oh. I'm not going to touch it. OK. Nope, I got the measurement wrong. Got to touch it again. 168. My bad. OK. Stay. Good. There we go. Sorry for those watching at home. Yeah, I can't see anything. There's a tape measure down here, and I measured 168. If you want to do this at home, go ahead. Go grab a tape measure. Put it out there in front of you right now. All right, so we have in front of me 14 feet, 168 inches. And this represents one week of our lives. If you can do math really quick, there are 168 hours in a week. So we have, for every inch here, we have an hour of our lives. OK? I want to show us how much we spend in devotion to different things in our life. Now, this is general. I didn't do any research here specifically. This is general numbers. OK? So your life may look very different, how much sleep you get, how much you work. But this is generally, we have-- OK, I got to start over here. This is one. Generally, we spend 56 hours a week, a third of our week sleeping. Some of you are like, I don't get enough. And some of you are like, well, hey, I get lots. And I'm way over there. That's great. But generally, 56, a third of our week is sleeping. We go another 56 inches, another third. This is work or school, whatever you're in. Generally, we're about here. So we're about 2/3 of our week sleep and work. Here's a surprising one. The average person spends 17 hours a week on social media. So now we're over here. Oh my goodness. Conviction yet? I know that was-- I was like, that's for sure me. I'm definitely doing that for church work, obviously. Obviously for church. That's-- no. So that leaves roughly 39 hours of our week. But we haven't yet factored in other things you guys are doing. So things around the house, chores, cooking, spending time with your kids, commute, working out, fill in the blank. But let's say we fill the rest of our week up and we're really close to the 168. And what we haven't factored in yet is how about our devotion to God? So let's say you guys are here, you spend one hour at church at least. So we'll dial it up right there. And we're really, by the way, 168 is right at that tape measure. So we're at the end. Our week is very full. And how much can you get from something that you're only giving one hour a week to? I won't ask that. There's a lot of things we can't control. You have to work. You have to sleep. But there is a lot of time that you do have some freedom in. If you invest only one hour a week into something, you're not going to see any significant growth or improvement. So one hour of exercise in a week, probably not going to be at peak health. One hour of time with your spouse, you probably won't have the healthiest relationship. One hour of study for the whole week, you probably won't graduate top of your class. The point is, if we are only partially devoted to God, only spending a little time with him each week when it's easy or comfortable, when there's nothing else to do, so you're like, "Hey, I finished everything else, might as well try to read my Bible right now." If we treat it in that way, if we treat our relationship with God in that way, then it's no wonder that we'll struggle with reoccurring sin in our life. It's no wonder that we don't often share our faith with other people. It's no wonder that we care more about what people think than what God thinks of us. And it's no wonder you find yourself only partially bought into a faith of living like Jesus. Partial devotion isn't going to help you have fulfillment in your life. It's not going to help in your pre-decisions of honoring Him in every area of your life. And it's not going to help you understand who God is and what He wants of you.

So then the question becomes how? If we want a fully devoted life to Jesus, it's not going to happen accidentally, it must be an intentional decision. You're going to have to pre-decide to live this ongoing single-minded pursuit of Jesus. And Jesus tells us how to do that in his Word. So if you want to turn with me again or look on the screen to John 15, Jesus, I'll start in verse 5, it says, "I am the vine," this is Jesus speaking, "I am the vine, you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing." So here in this verse, we have Jesus as the vine. Think of that as the trunk. It's the main one. And off of that, you have all these branches, and those are believers. So when we are abiding in Jesus, devoted to him, connected to him as the branch, then we will bear fruit. We're abiding with the source of life. What does that fruit look like? Well, that's love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, self-control, the fruits of the Spirit. These things are evidence that one is living life with Jesus. If you see that in a person, if you've ever encountered someone had an interaction and you're just like, "Man, there's just something about them," maybe because they're showing the fruit of living with Jesus. I was talking with someone this week who's losing their mother, she's passing away, and this person I was talking to does not have a good relationship with their mom and is struggling in this process because, by their words, their mom was not a very nice person. And they said, "I've never ever seen the fruit of the Spirit in them, and so I don't think they're a believer." And that saddens her. They want the mom to believe, but she just, I loved her process, she was like, "I don't think she's a believer because I've never seen any fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit, the fruit of abiding with Jesus is the evidence of faith. And so church, hopefully people see and experience some of the fruit of the Spirit when they experience you. When you are not living as the branch, when you're disconnected from Jesus, not devoted to him, maybe only spending one hour a week with Jesus, how do you expect to bear fruit in your life? Do you remember that question that I asked at the beginning? Do you ever feel like life seems a bit empty, meaningless at times? Well, when we devote ourselves to Jesus, when we live as the branch connected to the vine, when you dwell in him, life will start to feel full. Because again, This is what truly matters, and this is what truly lasts. This is what we were made for, to be Jesus' representatives in this world.

The author of Psalms, one of the books of wisdom in our Bible, says this about abiding and dwelling, remaining in God. It's Psalms 1 verse 1. It says, "How sit is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the path of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers. But the light is in the law of the Lord, and in his law he meditates day and night." And this is the part that I want us to just envision this in your mind. "He will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water, which yield its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither, and whatever he does he prospers." We want to be that tree. If we imagine Jesus as that river, as the source of life, we want to be the tree that's right next to it, always getting the nutrients and the nourishment that we need. And when we live right by the source of life, Jesus, then we will be exactly who we're meant to be. We will yield fruit. In our passage back in John with the vine and the branches, there's a word that appears a lot, 11 times in this chapter, so therefore we know it's very important, and it's the word remain. I'll just read verse four, right above verse five. It says, "Remain in me," again, Jesus speaking, "and I also remain in you. "No branch can bear fruit by itself. "It must remain in the vine. "Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me." This Greek word for remain is meno, which means to abide, to live and to dwell. And so that's not just one hour a week with God. This is constant, ongoing, full devotion, being all in to the one who matters most. And if we think of a vine and a branch, the branch needs the vine. The branch cannot survive without the vine. If the branch loses the vine, it dies. It has no life source, it won't get what it needs, and over time it will wither and die. It's the same for us. Jesus is the vine, you are the branch, so be the branch. Know who you are. Pre-decide to be devoted to Jesus. And make the decision today, "I will seek first the one who matters most." Alright, so we have the "who." We have what it means to be devoted, what a life of devotion looks like, and you have the "how," which is abiding in Jesus. And now I want to get to the practical. What's our game plan to make this a reality in our lives? How are you going to seek first God in your life? Like we said, it's not going to happen by accident. Not going to stumble upon a life of full devotion.

So, I have a plan. I have to reveal this plan to you. And I love how this is coinciding with our community group. We're talking in our community group, which meets on Wednesdays, about solitude and spending time with God. And so if you're in that community group, you're going to hear some similar things right now. I have three things for a plan of success for you. First is to pre-decide time. You gotta know when you're spending time with God. Are you gonna do it in the morning? First thing when you wake up? Or is it on your commute to work? Is it after the kids get dropped off at school or daycare? Is it at the end of your day? When you know that your mind is gonna be able to focus? You need to find a time that works regularly and has very little interruptions or distractions. And you need to decide how long. Are you spending 10 minutes, 15 minutes, a half hour, an hour? What does that time look like? Predecide. Don't go in it with like, "I guess I'll just go until I feel like it," because that will not work. You will fail. It's not going to go well. Predecide a time. When in the day and for how long? Secondly, predecide a place. You got to know where you are going to work best in a relationship with God. Is it that like perfect that couch with like your coffee table and the lamp, you got your Bible and your coffee setting is sometimes more important to some. I know for me I got to, everything's got to be right. I got to have the lamp on so I can see real up close and I got to have the coffee. Or maybe is there, is it on the back patio? Is it in the bathroom where you're just like, I can close that door, no one will bother me. This is my place of silence. Whatever, you know, whatever works. Is it in the laundry room? Is it in a park? Are you walking? Are you just moving? Are you in the car again in the commute or just like once you get to work you park and like before I go in I'm spending 15 minutes right here So find your time find your place and then pre decide a plan You got to have a plan for what you're spending if it's 15 minutes an hour know what you're gonna do Are you gonna be praying? How are you gonna be praying? Are you praying for people for other people? Are you? Praying through Scripture. Are you reading through the Bible? Are you listening to worship music? Is it a combination of things? I'm gonna spend some time here and then I'm gonna do this and then I'm gonna do this. I want to say this too. Remember to leave time to listen to God. We often have this need of getting caught up to fill the silence with noise. We don't like being quiet with God. And so we're just like as soon as we pause like, "Hmm, maybe a song will be good." Or, "Maybe I should talk some more. God, do you want to hear some more of my thoughts?" He knows your thoughts, by the way. It's good to express them, but you have to listen. It's got to be a two-way street. You talk to God and allow Him to talk back to you. Sit in silence with Him. So those are the three things. A time, a place, and a plan.

And I want to just mention a couple other things. If you are put in, I encourage you, put this into practice this week. But I want to give you a heads up. There's something called the J-curve. And if you've been in our Bible study, you've heard about this. But the J-curve is, and this is true of anything outside of spiritual practices too, if you just start a new hobby, or you try something out, you may experience some initial success. You start in this place of like, "Wow, this is going great, I'm actually, I can do this. I'm kind of good at this maybe." Maybe if it's devotion with God, you're like, "Man, that prayer time, that was awesome. I felt great after that, I felt close with God." But the J curve is studies show that over time, in the next week or two, you're going to be discouraged. And that is going to get really hard. And this new habit, this new thing you're trying to do, your feelings about it are going to go down. You're going to be like, "This is not working out anymore. I thought it was good, but I'm just struggling. It's challenging. I don't like it. I don't feel like it anymore." But studies also show that if you stick with it, in that downward turn, you will come back up and you'll go higher than you were before. So they call it the J-curve. You start off with maybe initial success, you like it, you get discouraged, but stick with it, and then you will experience more success. And so that is true of anything outside of spiritual practices, but it's very true in starting a new spiritual practice. So if you have all these things already down, you have a time, you have a place, and you have a plan, good. Be encouraged, continue that. You are living out a life of devotion. If this is new for you, then don't be discouraged when in the next week or two, it gets a little tough. That's okay. And I want to remind you of this too. The success in this quiet time, in this life of devotion, is not what you are checking off the list or gaining from this time. Some people go into this quiet time and they'll leave and be like, "I'm just discouraged. I didn't feel anything. I didn't feel God's presence. I didn't hear from him. I don't know if this is really working." But success in a life of devotion is showing up day after day. Just constant devotion to God, that is success. God loves it when you keep prioritizing Him day after day. That's what we talked about last week, is being consistent.

Be consistent in your devotion. And then also this, you've got to realize that your time of devotion, especially, I would encourage you to try to do at the beginning of the day, you are gearing up for what that day holds. This life, as we talked about two weeks ago with Pastor Lauren saying, "We need to be prepared. Are we ready? Because we will face resistance to our relationship with God." The enemy does not like when we spend time with God. The world does not really allow for us to spend time with God. It's going to try to distract us. It's going to try to pull us away. And even our own flesh. Our minds can be racing when we enter that time of solitude or that time of devotion. And So you have to know that that time is so important, you are gearing yourself up with the Spirit to face whatever happens that day. It is an essential time. Jesus practiced this, and so I think we should practice it too. If Jesus had to do it, we should definitely see that we have to do it too. So, our last question is when? If you have a plan of abiding, of spending time with him, but when? And we see our - I want to bring out our tape measure one more time - we see all this. Well, if we do those times in the day, that's still like only this much, right? If we were - only had a couple hours left, it's still maybe if you do 15 minutes, I mean, you're not - that's not - what about the rest of the week? What about the rest of the hours? I know maybe this is - here's where the perspective shift comes, all these 168 hours that you have in a week, God wants all of them. God doesn't just want the time where you're intentionally spending time with Him, He wants that too, but He wants all of your life. Through everything we face in a day, we should be talking with God, listening for God, and aligning our hearts with God. We want to be seeking God first, the one who matters most in every situation in life. He's not just some segment, some hour of our to fit in when it works for us. God wants all of our life. Seek God first. When something unforeseen comes up, when you are abiding in Him, you can hear from Him, He'll direct your steps, He'll give you the wisdom you need, He'll guide you through that, through His Word, through community, through prayer. You will have the wisdom to navigate life in the most God-honoring way when you are abiding in Him through everything. God doesn't want your leftovers. He wants all of you. God wants all 168 hours of your week. So, pre-decide, church, pre-decide to be devoted, to seek Jesus first and to let him impact every hour of your life. Whether that's at work, whether that's in how you spend your money, whether it's through parenting, relationships, whatever it is, abide in him while you are doing it. Remain in him. him, be devoted to him. So be ready, be consistent, and be devoted to God. Seek him first, the one who matters most, and devote all of who you are, your heart and mind, to Jesus.

Let's go ahead and pray. God, thank you again for your word, thank you for your example through the life of Jesus to show us what devotion looks like. And God, we pray that you would, through your Spirit, reveal to each and every one of us, because it may be different, how we can live a life that's more devoted to you. God, it really is a joy to know that you want all of our lives, you want every hour, and you're not satisfied with just a a little bit of every day, well that's essential and that's important. You want us to see that it's all of us that you want. You want all of our lives. So I pray, God, that you would help us to come before you, to hand over the burdens that we carry, to hand over the mess that we may feel our life is, and to surrender it to you. And to be before you with open arms, humbled, and say, God, use me. God, through your Spirit transform me. God, that's our prayer that you would continue to do work in us and through us. We are so thankful for all that you have done, for all that you're doing, and we know and trust that you will continue the good work that you have started. Be with us today and for the rest of our days. We pray this in your name, Amen.

Pre-Decide: Part 3

Pre-Decide: Part 3 - I AM CONSISTENT

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

We're continuing in our series this morning and I've heard from a few of you in this past week or so. You guys are enjoying this series, which is good. I'm glad that God is speaking to you through these messages and through His Word, and I hope that it continues today. In our series, we're talking about pre-deciding, those decisions that can positively affect the direction of our life, and that direction is determined by the quality of our decisions. The problem is that often when we get to these stressful moments or difficult, challenging we may not be the best decision makers. And so we want to pre-decide now to follow God in whatever happens. We're gonna have something for you this morning as we have our ushers handing out stickers to help you remember where we're going in our series, what we've covered. And if you remember, our scenario is this, when faced with whatever happens in life, I have decided to, and you fill in the blank. And these stickers, it's a sticker by the way, you get a little sticker with everything that we're covering and you can stick that wherever's helpful, in your Bible, I don't know where you stick, on your water bottle if you're one of those people, which is awesome. But we are, there's six things.

And so we've talked about last week, Pastor Lauren talked about being ready. And so, can we try this out? You say I am ready. I am, there we go. You guys were ready, kind of. We'll get there. Today we're going to be talking about consistent, how we're consistent. We're going to talk about how we're devoted, generous, faithful, and how we are finishers. So this morning, like I said, we're going to be covering, I want to share with you one of the most important spiritual qualities that has the potential to not only impact the trajectory of your year, but your entire life. And this quality can be the key to your physical health, your finances, your relationships, your goals, but more importantly, your spiritual strength, your ministry impact, and your ever-deepening relationship with God. And this quality is not based on appearances or background or education or experience. It's your consistency. Being consistent, disciplined, and steadfast has the potential to impact your life more than you might imagine. So what's the problem? Well the problem is that naturally many of us are inconsistent. We're inconsistent with what we eat, when we exercise, sticking to the budget that we made. We're inconsistent with spending time with God, praying, reading our Bibles when we said we were going to. Maybe some of you relate more with the sentiment that the most consistent thing is how inconsistent you are. Personally, I resonate with that a lot. As I was preparing for this sermon, I was praying, God, is there a reason is where I'm preaching this sermon, is where I'm preaching this consistency. I often have, thank you, I often have good intentions, but I struggle with the follow through. For example, I have this devotional app that I use, maybe some of you have heard of it, it's called Lectio 365, and my aspirations, my intent is to do that 365, 365 days of the year, every day, to use the app for my devotion. But I haven't made it a whole year yet, I've used this app for a couple years now. And I've usually gone like a month or so, and then for whatever reason, something comes up, maybe it's a holiday, and then all of a sudden I haven't done it in a week. And I'm like, oh, there that goes. And I gotta start over again, and I'll go a couple weeks, and then I'll skip a day here and there. And I just, I'm inconsistent. And I want to be, my desire is to do it every single day, but it doesn't happen, it hasn't happened yet. It can be hard to remain consistent. And I know I'm not alone in that, and if you're feeling the same way, that you're not alone in your struggle with consistency.

In fact, there's an apostle who wrote much of the New Testament, Paul, who also struggled with being consistent. He wrote this in Romans, Romans 7, 15 says, "I do not understand what I do, for what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is in my sinful nature, for I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do, this I keep on doing." He was very wordy when he said that, but you get the point that he's not doing what he wants and he's doing what he doesn't want to do. And if we can relate to Paul, I think we're in okay company right there. But if you're tired of having good intentions, but then failing and falling short, then hopefully this morning is going to be especially encouraging for you as we talk about the power of consistency in our spiritual life. Today we're going to pre-decide, adding to our readiness, we're going to talk about consistency. And here's the key, you're not doing this on your own. Not only do we have each other, but we also have the help of the God who created us. Because it's with God's help that we can be consistent. With God's help, I can be consistent in my daily devotion. Why does consistency matter? Well, successful people do constantly what other people do occasionally. Successful people, experts in whatever field or practice, they don't just do those things occasionally or familiarize themselves with it when it matters. They are surrounded by it. They're immersed in it. They are in it all the time. They are doing it over and over and over again. One pastor said, "It's not what we do occasionally that makes the difference, it's what we do consistently." Think of a skill or some area of knowledge that you know really, really well. You're an expert in it, in your circle. You probably just didn't, it's like one time I looked it up and I figured it all out and I became an expert in one moment. Or with this skill, whatever sport you play, I just practiced one time and I was the best. I doubt it happened that way. Maybe you have some God-given skills, but you had to be in it over and over again and commit time and devotion to it.

So today, we're gonna look at how scripture says that consistency matters and see how growing in our consistency is a way to better honor God. We'll be in the Old Testament today, looking at a particular man in history that demonstrated incredible consistency, who had pre-decided to follow God in all situations, even in captivity, even when faced with conspiracy, and facing death. And that man is Daniel. So you guys can find, turn in your Bibles if you want to Daniel 6, and as you're turning there, let me explain some of where we're at in Israel's history. Shortly after Israel was defeated, and Jerusalem was destroyed by the kingdom of Babylon, life changed very quickly for God's people in the Old Testament, the Israelites. Babylon began taking young men from Israel captive, the best and the brightest. They took back to Babylon to help them contribute to the Babylonian kingdom. They took Israel's potential leaders to have them be leaders for the kingdom of Babylon. And Daniel is one of those people. He stood out to King Nebuchadnezzar as one of the best young men from Israel. And later after King Nebuchadnezzar died, the next king, King Darius, saw the same potential in Daniel, said this is one of the best that they have to offer. He noticed Daniel's leadership and consistency and promoted Daniel to a very high position in the kingdom. Now Daniel's rise to power did not settle well with some of the other leaders, the non-Israelite leaders. And so they tried to undermine Daniel's credibility. They tried to find fault with him. And if this was happening in today, it means that they were looking for dirt. They're looking on his social media. They're looking for anything, and he runs with the law. They're just looking for anything to get Daniel canceled. So we don't like this guy. We don't like how he keeps rising in power. What can we do to take him out? And you know what they found? It says in Daniel 6, verse 4, "At this, the administrators and the satraps "tried to find grounds for charges against Daniel "in his conduct of government affairs, "but they were unable to do so. "They could find no corruption in him "because he was trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent. Another version says he was faithful, always responsible, and completely trustworthy. Daniel showed consistency in practicing his faith in God. Even in a foreign country, even in captivity, he showed consistency in being responsible and trustworthy and faithful. So what happens? Well, because Daniel is consistent and there's no dirt on him, these jealous leaders attempt to create a problem for Daniel. They're hoping to trap him by using his consistency against him. They go to the king and they schmooze their way into creating this new law. They're like, "King, because you're so great, "because you're amazing, we think that only you "should be worshiped and prayed to for the next 30 days." And the king's like, "You know what? "I am great, you are right. "Let's do that, let's make that a reality." And so, for 30 days, there's a decree given that everyone must pray only to King Darius, no other god. And if anyone were to break this law, the punishment would be being thrown into the lion's den. Now we are not necessarily familiar with lions and a den of lions, but this was certain death. This was not, hey, you might survive, it might be entertaining to see if you could try to make it the day. No, this was certain death. And so we have to recognize that this plan was put in place solely for the purpose of killing Daniel. In the minds of the jealous leader, this thing was as good as done. As soon as King Darius signed the sins of law, they said, "We got him. We've got Daniel. We can get rid of this guy." And so let's read what happens next.

In verse 10 of chapter 6 of the book of Daniel, it says, Now when Daniel learned that the decree had been published, he went home to his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem. Three times a day, he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to his God, just as he had done before. What do we see right here? We see Daniel's consistency. It's not a sudden decision that, hey, I'm in a really hard time right now, let me go to God and figure out what I'm supposed to do. No, he continued in his regular practice of prayer. I have a hard thing going on, God, right now, but let me just talk to you like I always do at this time. His relationship was established, and he just continued in his regular rhythm of talking with God. Well, the jealous leaders were able to trap Daniel in his integrity and took it before the king. And they said, "We found Daniel praying "to someone besides you, King Darius." And the king was bound by his own word and by the law that he had made to make Daniel face the punishment. Now, there's a whole other story here that King Darius didn't wanna do this. King Darius really liked Daniel. And so he was really saddened to have to throw Daniel into the lion's den. But he does. And so Daniel's thrown into the pit, lion's den, and everyone is thinking, "This is it." It was good knowing Daniel. He was great. good faithful servant of God and to the king, but it's over now. If you already know the story, then you know that it's a good ending. But instead of Daniel dying, a miracle happens and God sent angels in the night to keep the mouths of the lions shut. And in verse 23, it says, "The king was overjoyed and gave orders to lift Daniel out of the den. And when Daniel was lifted from the den, no wound was found on him because he had trusted in God. He lived, he survived certain death because he trusted in God. Now church, I wanna ask this, and this is the key. When did Daniel learn to trust God? It wasn't in the lion's den. He learned to trust God in his routine, on his knees, in prayer, three times a day, day after day, week after week, month after month.

Daniel's faith wasn't built in battle, his faith was built in remaining consistent in pursuing God every single day. It's not what we occasionally do that makes the difference, it's what we consistently do. Most of us pray occasionally, Daniel prayed consistently, and so our desire is to be more like Daniel. just in prayer, but in every aspect of our life that is God honoring, we want to be more like Daniel and be more consistent. So let me give you three thoughts regarding consistency. These are from Pastor Greg Groeschel, and I think they're really helpful for us today to hear and to understand. And they are starting with the why. We want to plan to fail, and we want to fall in love with the process. So let's start with the why. Why did Daniel pray consistently? Well, it wasn't about outward appearances. It wasn't about appearing spiritual. This is the problem that the Pharisees had in the New Testament that Jesus reprimanded them for, saying, "You're just praying out loud to boast "and to seem and come across so spiritual." Daniel did this in the quiet of his home upstairs, so it wasn't about that. But he prayed consistently because he was devoted to God. He was committed to having the best relationship with God. It wasn't just desire, it was devotion. And devotion stems from the heart. Devotion to God sees that we are God's creation, made to serve him with everything that we have so that we can and others can know him. Really, any goal, be it financial or personal career, it goes beyond your personal desire. And it has to come from wanting to honor God and live according to his will. Because we have to understand that God is God, we are not. His ways are perfect, and that means that we want to be devoted to the one who is perfect. We won't really change if we don't know our why. Transformation is not based on our desire or willpower, because eventually our desire and willpower will fail us. We will run out of willpower. We will stop wanting or desiring at a certain time, relying on our own strength. We will eventually take the foot off the pedal. We'll come to a place of not exercising, even just for a day. We don't like it anymore. Whatever it is, we will fail ourselves. Like my struggle with my daily devotion of Lectio 365. When I'm trying to do it all by myself, there's mornings when I wake up, I'm like, I'm just so tired. I don't wanna do it today. And then I don't. But when we know our why, when we remain devoted, when we, like Daniel, continue to pray three times a day, no matter what, we can continue through. We can continue through disinterested moments, challenging schedules, or any other stumbling block. The why is really pointing us to rely on God to be what God created us to be. Like we said at the beginning, it's with God's help that we can be consistent. and how we rely on God who is perfectly consistent. Well, how do we know that God is consistent?

Well, this whole Bible is a story of God being consistent, but there's a specific scene I wanna point us to. It's in Exodus 34, and this is a moment where God is with Moses, and Moses and God are having this conversation, and Moses is saying, "God, I wanna know you more. "I've been leading your people, "but I still don't know who you are. "Can you tell me who you are?" And God says, "I'll tell you exactly who I am." Exodus 34, 6 through 7 says, "And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, 'The Lord, the Lord,' which in the Hebrew is his name." God is saying his own name, he's introducing himself. And he says, "The compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin." That phrase, abounding in love and faithfulness and maintaining love to thousands, that's talking about God being consistent. The Hebrew words there are a covenantal love steadfast commitment. God is eternally consistent. No matter how many times his people failed him, doubted him, denied him, or actively rebelled against him, God never failed them. God continued with his plan of redemption. The Old Testament is a story of God's people continually turning away from God over and over again deciding, you know what God, I just I don't want to do this anymore. And God never giving up on them. God sending person, prophet, leader, miracles, bad things to say, hey I'm trying to get your attention, I have a plan, I'm remaining consistent in pursuing you. God remained consistent in his pursuit of humanity and it all led to him bringing salvation through his son Jesus. Church, no matter how much we wrestle with our consistency and relationship with him, we can recognize and praise God that he is always consistent with us. So, we rely on him. We know our why because we are devoted to the one who is eternally devoted to us. And when we know our why, we'll find a way. So, we begin with our why and next, we plan to fail. This sounds really counterintuitive. Why are we planning to fail? Well, we have to plan not to be perfect. Do we have any perfectionists in the room? You don't have to raise your hand. I know there are some. I won't point you out. Perfectionists will be-- this is tough for everyone. This is especially tough for perfectionists. Failure is tough. Failure can make it feel like it's not It's not worth it to continue anymore. But let me remind you that you are not perfect, and the only perfect person to ever live was Jesus. Everyone else has had to work through imperfections and failures, but everyone else has also had the opportunity to grow from them.

Any of the heroes of the Bible that we tend to put on a pedestal and think that they were perfect, they were not. All the heroes of the Bible had their inconsistencies, their imperfections, even Daniel. And so why is it that so many of us are inconsistent? We've already talked about losing the willpower. It can also be because we can have an all or nothing mindset. If we fail one time, we think that we are a failure. We can wrap up our identity and our actions of success or failure, which is not how God sees us, by the way. We have to remember that being consistent does not mean being perfect. We need to give ourselves grace to fail. I'll say that again for everyone, and especially for the perfectionists in the room. Give yourself grace to fail. If Jesus has enough grace to give to you, then you should certainly have grace on yourself. You're gonna mess up. You have to plan for what happens next. What are you gonna do after you fail? Predecide for your failure. Again, Pastor Craig Groeschel says, "Know that a momentary failure "is actually a part of the process. "And really the problem for many of us "is the illusion of perfection "keeps us from getting started." We think, I'm never gonna be great at that, so I might as well not even try. Have you ever been invited to participate in something, an activity, and you say, oh, thank you so much, but that's okay, I'm good. Not because you're being polite, but because you're like, I'm not gonna be good at that, so I don't want to embarrass myself, I don't want to try, I don't want everyone to see me fail. That's me, for sure. I noticed this in our daughter at times, when she gets so upset when she messes up. And we're just trying to, it's okay. You're gonna mess up, you're gonna fail, you're not gonna get it, that's fine. And she gets so worked up that she just didn't do it perfectly and she wants to give up. And it's a reminder, I see myself in it, I'm like, oh my goodness, this is me all over again in so many areas of life. Because some of us are viewing our relationship with Jesus like that. There's some of you who may not be following Jesus today because you think, "Well, if I start following Jesus, what happens when I mess up? What if I fail and my language is bad, or I'm not loving, or my thoughts are completely terrible, or whatever it is that I struggle with, what's going to happen when I fail? Because I don't think I'm going to be a good Christian, so I don't think I'm going to try.

Well, I'm here to tell you that you will fail, and everyone in this room who is a Christian has also failed. But don't let that stop you from pursuing God with everything that you have. And letting God love you and show you mercy and compassion and grace in your failure. It's all part of the process. There are growing pains. There are moments that aren't great, but it's not all a complete loss. So, know that you won't be perfect. Don't confuse being consistent with being perfect. Start with the "why." Plan to fail. And then lastly, fall in love with the process. In our story of Daniel, Daniel wasn't doing something to get this promotion. He wasn't like, "Hey, if I remain consistent in my faith and all these things, my end goal is to get this position in the Kingdom of Babylon." No. He was consistently doing what he knew to be important, being devoted to God. It's the process of being devoted that matters to God, not this goal. We tend to be a very goal-oriented people. task, I got to get it done, and here I want to measure my growth, I want to measure how successful I am. And we tend to measure success by only one metric, which is accomplishing the task. It is either pass/fail. Either I did it, or I didn't do it, and either I'm a success or I'm a failure. And again, that is not how God views us. So we shouldn't necessarily view ourselves in that way either. In fact, I think that's a terrible way to measure your spiritual journey, or to measure how you are as a Christian. Rather, it's in how we honor God that we can measure. We can have a moment of failure, but if we got back up and committed ourselves to God, we should say, "That's what matters. God cared about that right there, of how after I sinned or after I failed in whatever way, God loved that I got back up and I kept pursuing Him." Again, Pastor Groeschel says, "You're not successful when you achieve the goal in the future. You're successful when you honor God today." I think that's really wise. Now it's good to accomplish things. We can set our minds to things and want to do them, but ultimate success is when we honor God. You won't hear that from the world. This is not the world's definition of success, but this is what God cares about, is when you honor him. He is so overjoyed and happy and content with you when you honor him. Learning to honor God in the process, even when you mess up, that's the important part. This process includes ups and downs. Recognize that, acknowledge that, and plan accordingly. Pre-decide for when you fail.

A professor once shared with me that when we're younger in life, we tend to have these big ups and downs in life. When we're up, we're feeling great, we're overjoyed, we're loving to everyone else, we have a lot of energy. Life is so good, and we're feeling on top of the world. And then whatever happens, it can knock us down. And when we're down, we're really down. I think of high school and college, and it was a lot of this with friendships and just everything going on. And when you're down, you're empty, maybe you're bitter, there's not a lot to give, you're selfish. But we notice, he was sharing that with older people, older Christians, those same things may be happening, but you're not getting this big sweep. You're kind of just getting a more consistent line. I wish I had a graphic here, 'cause my hand, I don't know if you can follow my hand on what I'm trying to do. But instead of these roller coasters, big up and down, it's still an upward trajectory towards God, but you're a more consistent line. You're still feeling those things, maybe, but they're not dominating your life or just taking over you. You are more in tune with God and what He has for you in that moment. And so that's our desire. Instead of having these big ups and downs, we wanna remain consistent with God in our relationship with Him. That's the process, steady, consistent devotion to Him. So I wanna end by reminding us that we can't do this without God's help. And so I wanna invite you right now to reflect. We're talking about pre-deciding to follow God in all areas of our lives, and maybe in this series, there's something specific that God has brought to the forefront of your mind. And I wanna ask, where is God calling you to be consistent? In what area of your life is God bringing to your heart and to your mind that you need to be more consistent in? So think about that. And if it helps, if you're not sure, ask God, God, where do you want me to be more consistent? Where can I honor you more? Where can I be more faithful? Is it with your family, your spouse, your kids? Is it with your prayer time, your Bible reading time, your speech, your attitude? Maybe how you treat those around you, how you spend your time in general or your money. Whatever God is putting on your heart, give it over to him, ask him for his help in that area. Rely on him to be consistent. Pre-decide, church, with me. Start with the why, plan to fail, and fall in love with the process of being made more and more like Jesus. So say it with me. With God's help, with God's help, I am consistent. I am consistent. Yes. So you are ready, you are consistent. You'll find out more in the weeks to come how you're also generous, how you'll be devoted, and how you're faithful, and how you're a finisher.