The Book of Jude: Part 2

The Book of Jude

Part 2: Recognizing the Counterfeits

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

Well, I am excited to be bringing part two of Jude to you this morning, and if you haven't heard of the book of Jude, I don't blame you. It's only, what, 25 verses long. There isn't even a second chapter. It is so quick and short, but we felt that God had something for us to learn even in this book, and so we're taking three weeks to go through the book of Jude, and then we're gonna start on a journey to Easter together called the Ministry of Jesus, and we're gonna follow Jesus' journey to the cross, to Easter together, and we're really looking forward to that series starting in a few weeks. But this morning, we're gonna be jumping into Jude, but we're gonna start, I believe, around verse five. Pastor Andre did a great job last week kinda giving us an intro to the book and really talking through the first four verses of this letter, and what's really cool is Jude here is encouraging people to continue to contend for the faith, to remember who you are at your core. He talked about how we are called, we're loved, and we're kept, and that because of that we're called, we're loved, and we're kept, we have a new identity. When we ask Jesus to come into our lives, to change us, to transform us, to make us new, to put the sin away and to put on the new identity in Christ, God transforms us. He changes who we are, and this is foundational that in this, when we know as not ourselves, not as Roy or Matt or Carolina or Eric or anybody else, but that we are now in Christ.

We are in Christ Jesus, and this is foundational to know how we stand to contend for the faith. What do I mean by that? Well, what I mean is that in standing up for the faith in Jesus Christ, we have to be able to decide what is true and what is not true, and the greatest thing in the world, we have two amazing things in our lives that help us with us, and we don't have to figure this out. We have the Holy Spirit, we sang about this morning together, and we have the Bible, we have God's word for our lives to then help us know how we stand for the faith. When other things come at us that aren't of God and try to throw us off, we're able to stand for the faith for God. But first, I wanna pray real quick before we jump in. Jesus, we thank you for this morning. God, we continue to invite you into this space. Jesus, I pray for myself that you would give me the words this morning to share, Jesus, that you have, through your servant Jude, written a letter to remind the church how to stand for truth. And so, Jesus, I pray that we would be open to what you have for us. God, I don't believe it's an accident that anybody is here in this space this morning, but Jesus, you have something for every single one of us. And so, God, I pray we have open ears, open hearts, open minds to truly understand what you want us to hear today, not what we brought in or what we're looking or any agenda we have in our lives, but you, Jesus, would speak truth into our lives this day. Amen.

Jude here is telling us that as we stand for the faith, that we have to be able to recognize counterfeits. We have to recognize things that aren't true, things that are false. This summer, every summer, if you guys have been around the rhythm of Spring Valley, we have a fireworks booth that we host in our parking lot, and all week, we out there and we sit in the hot and we sweat and we sell black powder is essentially what we're doing. Just be honest. We're selling miniature explosions as much as the state of California will allow us to sell. You have to go to the other states for the really good stuff, sorry. But as we're out there selling, we're making lots of transactions. And I remember at the end of the week, we gathered up all the cash that we had and we took it to the bank to deposit all of our sales. And as they're counting all the money up and going through everything, this $100 bill pops out of the machine. And I think, oh no. And so she pulls it aside and she starts to investigate why the currency machine kicked this $100 bill out. And all week, if you know, Shelly, she is the champion. She is the queen of fireworks. She runs that booth like a well oiled machine. She takes care of us so well, she's sick today. We miss you, we love you, we're praying for you, Shelly. And we had been so careful all week. We had the pens, you know where you can draw, you make sure, we even had the UV light out there to be able to look at everything. And this $100 bill passed the pen test and it passed the UV light test. But as we're sitting there at the bank, I'm talking to tell her, there's just something about this $100 bill that isn't sitting right. She takes the pen, she tests it, it passed. She puts it under their UV light, it passed. But the more that she began to investigate this $100 bill, we quickly began to understand that it was counterfeit. It was a fake. And that somewhere along the way, in the busyness that can be out there in that booth, we did what we were supposed to do. We took the checks, we looked for truth. We hit the pen, we hit the light. But she began to show me on the backside of the $100 bill, right near the bottom of it, the printing was blurry. It wasn't crisp. And the more that she touched that and rubbed it, the ink actually started to smudge. And I said, "How often do you get this?" And she goes, "Hardly ever." She goes, "Honestly, it rarely happens." She goes, "Most people who work in businesses and jobs have touched money so much through transactions that they just know when they touch it." And that's true for the Secret Service who deals with counterfeits, the FBI, local law agencies. How they train for counterfeits is they do nothing but trust and touch real paper money. They look at all the details. They look at the nuances. They look at the UV lighting that's on it. They look at the printing. They look at the smallest details and they just touch it time and time again. And so the moment they begin to touch something that doesn't feel right, a red flag goes up and says, "Hold up, time out. Something isn't right."

You must know the real thing to be able to spot counterfeits and part of contending for the faith means that we have to discern false versus what God said is true. It's spotting the counterfeits that are disguised so well as truth around us that actually begin to hurt our faith. That $100 bill passed the pen test. It passed the UV light test. It did everything that we thought we had done to set up to prevent this. And yet, because we do not touch money regularly and handle it, know the details, know the nuances and all the little details, we weren't able to catch this counterfeit. And Jude here is basically saying in this section that there are false teachers out there. That isn't something we're debating today. There are false teachers out there. There are ungodly people who are trying to do what they want to do, making their own selfish decisions. And Jude here wants to make a point.

So he says, starting in verse five, he says, "Though you already know all of this, I want to remind you that the Lord at one time delivered his people out of Egypt, but later destroyed those who did not believe. And the angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their proper dwelling, these he has kept in darkness, bound everlasting chains for judgment on the great day. And in a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves to sexual immorality and perversion. They serve as an example of those who suffer "he punishment of eternal fire." Whoa. Jude just comes in with like the one-two punch here, right? He's like, I got a short letter, guys. I said, I made a joke that Jude is like the text message of communication in the early church, it's so short. Like Paul's writing like theses over here and mailing off these giant letters. And then you got other ones that are shorter, like 1st and 2nd Timothy is kind of like an email. And then Jude is like a text message. So I mean, you only got so many characters to use up, right? We want to get to the point here. And Jude jumps in and he says, "You have to watch out for false teachers." Because what happened? He goes, "The Israelites didn't obey God. "God redeemed them out of Egypt, rescued them, saved them. "And yet they didn't obey God. "And because of that, they had to wander "in the desert for 40 years." He said, "Then the angels." This is kind of interesting. If you guys know any story about this, the angels is the story of Genesis 6. That there were these angels that rejected their dwelling with God and actually said, I want to go to earth. And so God said, okay, you can go, but that is your life. There is no coming back from this. So the angels left and came down and they glorified themselves among humans, having relations with them and dwelling with them. And because of that, the angels chose to glorify themselves. And then Sodom and Gomorrah, if you guys know the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, they were two powerhouse cities. I mean, I'm talking about powerhouse, the top of the top, the most GDP, the greatest. They had the armies, they had the wealth, they had everything, but what happened? They rejected the way of God's living. And because they rejected and they tried, they tried. God sent angels, God sent leaders, God sent so many people to Sodom and Gomorrah said, turn away, there's a better way to live your life. You're living for yourself, but yet they rejected it. And so in the end, their own selfish decisions led to their demise. So Jude is giving these three pretty powerful stories. So people that are reading in this context, they come from a Jewish background, they would immediately understand what he is talking about comparing to false teachers. And we can see what their choices actually ended up costing them. God's judgment. We don't like to talk about this side of God, right? We want the loving, the caring, the gracious, the blessing, the merciful, we want that side, we like that God, but you can't have that side of God without the other side that says, there's a line in the sand, enough is enough.

And so I see two warnings for our church today. Today's modern church, number one is this is an encouragement, okay? You're like, what, how, what? No. These examples, they confirm that these false teachers, no matter how much they get away with what they do, no matter how much they hurt people, no matter how far they lead people astray, there will be consequences. God is the king. God is Lord. God is on the throne. And they will be judged and condemned for their actions. Maybe this side of eternity or after, it's up to God. The Israelites, they were punished here on earth. The angels were bound in chains as darkness, as the scripture says. And Sodom and Gomorrah suffered destruction under fire. I mean, fireballs from heaven, talking about a fireworks show, holy buckets, crazy. These, all these people preached a false gospel.

Second thing I see is that we must take this message to heart and to be on our guard, always aware, always looking around, always paying attention to guard our hearts against these false teachers. Time and time again, it breaks my heart when I hear and read about stories of pastors who have just fallen from the faith. And it breaks my heart because it's not just them, personally, it's not just their families. It's communities of faith, churches that just lie in ruins in the wake of these false teachers as they led their people astray. And it makes me so sad and my heart goes out to them because I know people personally who have been hurt by the church. Some God had been able to redeem and bring back to the church and say, that was not my way. This is my way, come back. Some are like, I want nothing to do with this God ever again for the rest of my life because of false teachers. God isn't messing around when he talks about these. Being a good Christian doesn't mean we aren't susceptible to falling for these false teachings. The enemy is the master deceiver. He twists things, he puts just little drops of truth along the way so we think, oh, okay, this is gonna be okay. It's gonna be all right. But we must continue to walk faithfully daily with Jesus and to know his word, to have this. So I've hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you, God. To his word deep down inside of us that'll never go away, that we have the truth inside of who we are, to understand, to stand against these false teachings and to contend for the faith.

Jude continues in verse eight, he says this. “In the very same way, on the strength of their dreams, these ungodly people pollute their own bodies, reject authority, heap abuse on celestial beings. But even the Archangel Michael, when he was disputing with the devil about the body of Moses did not himself dare to condemn him for slander, but said, the Lord rebuke you. Yet these people slander whatever they do, do not understand. And the very things they do not understand by instinct as irrational animals do, will destroy them. Woe to them. They have taken the way of Cain. They have rushed for profit into Balaam's air and they have destroyed in Korah's rebellion.” What's going on here? He talks about Cain, he talks about Balaam and Korah. What's the story here? Again, some background history here. Cain ended up bringing an offering to God, however, it was without faith. And in turn, out of his jealousy, which God rejected his offering and took his brothers, he went and killed his own blood in anger. His own brother, he killed him. And Jude here is saying, this is dead religion. How do you say that? Well, the Bible tells us that faith without works is dead. Cain brought his offering without faith. So he had the works of the offering, but didn't have any faith, it was backwards. And because of that, it was a dead religion that Cain was actually practicing. False religion, incorrect religion, untrue religion and worship. Well, what about Balaam? Well, Balaam, he was intentionally, intentionally led others into sin. He was in control in leadership and he intentionally led people into sin. Why? For his own profit. He was making money off of leading people into sin. And then Korah, Korah rebelled against God's authority and even against the mediator who is Jesus. There's so much here in these three stories. I don't have time this morning. But Korah rebelled against authority and rejected God's given authority at that time in Israel.

Now Jude is really honest here. If you thought he was hitting hard, he's about to continue to hit a little bit harder here. Says this in the next section. It's really poetic. It's kind of beautiful the way he says this. But he said, "These people are blemishes at your love feast, eating with you without the slightest qualm, shepherds who feed only themselves. They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind, autumn trees without fruit and uprooted, twice dead. They are wild waves of the sea foaming up their shame, wandering stars from the blackest darkness has there been reserved forever." Jude isn't holding back here. You know, guys, you caught some of that stuff. But he talks about some key things here. He talks about these love feasts. What is he talking about this? Well, in the early church, they would have called these agape feasts, which would have been what we know today as potlucks, right? Next Sunday, soup and salad Sunday, sign up in the back, be here for our love feast. No, I'm kidding. But our church meal is next week. But they would gather together. And what this actually was, was it was a moment for the church to all come collectively to bring food, to invite the community in, to then provide a meal for those who didn't have any food. And for some, that was their only meal of the week, was Sunday. And they would go a whole week without food, looking forward to that next Sunday, to go to church, to be fed spiritually by the word of God, but physically by a meal shared together. And what does Jude say? Jude says, "They're hanging out at these gatherings. They're among you. You may not see them. You may not understand them. They may be putting the face on and saying all the right Christian words, right? We have a language that we speak in the church. They're saying all the right things, but they're there to manipulate. They're there to connive. They're there to leverage people for their own personal gain." He continues on, "Clouds without rain." What are clouds made to do? They're made to bring rain. They're made to bring what came this morning, water, nourishment, life to earth. But a rain with, or a cloud without rain is kind of useless, right? It's just blown away by the wind. He continues on, "Autumn trees without fruit and are uprooted. They're twice dead." Well, if you guys know, autumn time is harvest. I love going up to Apple Hill. Autumn time, oh, just such a best. All the apples are out there for harvest. The trees are bearing fruit. But what happens when a tree doesn't bear fruit? Gets cut down. Why? The purpose of the tree is to bear fruit. And so in these orchards, when a tree ceases to produce fruit, it's chopped down, it's uprooted, it's burned, it's tossed away, and a new tree is planted in hopes that it will produce fruit.

Jude here is also saying a little bit of a test here. If you find people and you're not too sure about where they are or where their faith is, test them for fruit. Look for results of God's transformation in their lives. To see the fruit, to see the transformation, to know, because false teachers don't have fruit. Continues on, "Wild waves of the sea just bashing up against the coast." Bash, that does nothing good, right? All it does is break down the coast. It breaks down, creates cliffs and rocks and treacherous waters. Wandering stars. You guys know about anything about the North Star? We've had some field trips with our kids lately, and I started to learn more about the stars, and it's pretty amazing about the North Star and how the reason they use it for navigation and how they do it, because basically the way the earth rotates, that star doesn't move in the sky. Every other star, as the earth spins, we move around those stars, and the stars are moving around us. But the North Star stands still. It is what they call, by definition, true north. And that's how sailors would navigate waters before GPS or coordinates or maps or anything. They would know where they're plotting based on the trajectory and the movement of them compared to the North Star, because the North Star is true. It doesn't change, it doesn't move, it doesn't do anything but stick right there. What a blessing from God, right? What a blessing from God to have that truth.

Jude here is making it clear that these false teachers are pointless at best and wreak havoc at worst. Yeah, they may make waves. They may draw attention. They may make noise, but it's short-lived. It leaves behind them a wake of shame, uncertainty, and chaos. But when we are on guard, contending for the faith, looking out for the false, looking out for the counterfeits, paying attention, we're able to see truth. We're able to see the truth of God moving in people among us. It's sad, the latest study of, I think it was a bar in a group or something, they do a bunch of church studies, that the reputation of pastors and Christians is the lowest it's been in basically the history of the church today. Because of the false teachers, because of the hypocrisy, because of the manipulation, because of the greed, because of the sexual immorality, because of the sin. Now, you have to remember that pastors are people too. You can't be putting people on pedestals. But it also means that we have a higher calling to teach the truth. I love what Pastor Andre said last week. If you find one of us preaching something that is not true to scripture, that is hypocrisy, call us out. 100%. Because if we don't lead in the way of the truth, we're no greater than any of these people that Paul or that Jude is calling out here in this letter. We have to use discernment. We live in this world of manipulation and deception, right? Social media, nothing we see on social media is true, right? Nothing we read. The 24 hour news cycle that just does not stop. Other religions around us trying to say, this is truth, this is what this means. Half truths, manipulated truths, where they're packaged up and they look beautiful, right? And we go, there it is. But when we begin to open it up and discover that's not truth, we have to use discernment to see what is true. The theologian, Erdman writes this, he said, "There is no other gospel. There will be none. Its content will be more fully understood. Its implications will be developed. Its predictions will be fulfilled, but it will never be supplemented, succeeded, or supplanted." Did you guys catch that? This is truth. The gospel is truth.

Says in 2 Timothy 3:1-5, "But mark this, there will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure, rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness, but denying its power, having nothing to do, have nothing to do with such people." This could have been written this week. But this was written in the early church 2,000 years ago. World doesn't change much, does it? Just new generations, and new generations, and new generations. Paul makes it clear, have nothing to do with these people. So Jude wraps everything up in this section. He ends it with a quote from Enoch, which is kinda interesting. If you guys know the story of Enoch in Genesis, he was only a handful of generations separated from Adam, the original human being created in the garden. And even though Enoch's writings are highly regarded with their truth of being grounded in scripture, this is actually not scripture itself, but it says this. “Enoch, the seventh from Adam, so the seventh generation from Adam, prophesied about them. He said, See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones to judge everyone and to convict all of them of all the ungodly acts they have committed in their ungodliness. And all, and all the defiant words ungodly sinners have spoken against him. These people are grumblers, faultfinders. They follow their own evil desires. They boast about themselves and flatter others for their own advantage.” Jude really, really, really wants to make it clear to the point that false teachers or anybody preaching any other gospel other than the gospel of Jesus Christ will be judged and punished. God ain't messing around when it comes to the gospel. That is a black and white issue. There ain't no gray in there whatsoever. And ultimately, our responsibility as followers of Christ in that gospel is to be on the lookout and on guard against all of these false teachers. False teachers are everywhere. They're in churches, they're in communities, they're all over social media. They're online, everywhere to be found. And we have to be on guard knowing what truth is so we can hold it up against the counterfeit to go, does this feel right? Does this look right? Is this printed correctly? Is this exactly how the Bible says is truth? Or is it off course? False teachers come all spectrums from just a little bit to wonky. There's some wonky ones out there. But we have to be on the lookout. Not allowing even just regular sinfulness to come into our hearts. We just finished a series, Habits of a Healthy Heart. And we talked about what the word repent means. Re, to turn away, to pent, penthouse, higher. To turn away from the lower being of false teachers and false truth and false religions, turning away from that to the higher, greater calling that God has for each of our lives. To repent, to turn to God's life, to see the truth, to follow his teachers that he's blessed us with that lead us in the truth of the gospel. We have to be on guard against choosing rote obedience rather than living by faith that leads to dead religion. We have to be on guard choosing to follow not our own selfish desires that lead us astray in our own sin. We have to be on guard, as Jude said, choosing not to grumble or constantly find fault in anything, in any act of rebellion against a good and righteous God. So we contend for the faith by being on the lookout for false teachers, fighting to find the truth in the pulpit and in public places. And we fight for that truth to be preached in our own hearts, in our own homes, and in our own churches, right? The first step in turning from rebellion is to confess anything that we got going in our heart that isn't up to truth of God's scripture.

So question this morning as we wrap up. What rebellion in your life or in your heart do you need to confess? Jude's not pulling punches. Jude's coming straight at us. Sometimes we need that, right? Sometimes we need somebody just to come at us and tell us how it is, right? There's enough fluff in this world. Jude ain't no fluff. (laughs) So I want us to take just a moment right here. I want you just to bow your head, go before God, and just ask God to do an inventory on your heart and your life. And to go, God, where am I believing a false religion? Where have I unbeknownst, succeeded, succumbed to false teaching? Or maybe where do I have just a little bit of rebellion in my heart? Where I'm flirting with that line of sin, or maybe you've stepped into it, and maybe you're walking alongside it. We talked about have we befriended sin in our last series? But let God search your heart. Let him take inventory and begin to reveal to you right now in this moment.

We're just gonna take a moment pray together, quiet in our hearts. Search our hearts, Father. Show us if there is any wicked or wrong way in us, Jesus. Not in a sense to control us or to put us down or to bring shame onto our hearts, 'cause that's not from you, God. But that part of this salvation piece of transforming our lives is changing things in our hearts, changing the way maybe we see those around us, changing the way that we might act when nobody's looking, change the way that we have for our priorities in our life that are not God-honoring. God, maybe it's a specific sin that you've placed on our heart this morning, Jesus. I pray that we would repent from that, that we would turn away from the lower, the false, the less, and turn to receive your greater love, your greater hope, your greater mercy. Jesus, I pray this week that this introspection would not stop here, but that it would continue on, God, throughout this week and throughout this series as we finish up Jude next week, God, that you would truly take an inventory inside of us. It's easy to look around at those in our lives and to go like, oh, they're messing up. They're not doing it right. They don't have their stuff together, that they're a false teacher, and I'm doing okay, God. I'm not as bad as them. But this isn't a comparison game, God. This is holding up truth, scripture, your word against our lives, not comparing us to anybody else. And we need to take a moment to pause our lives, to look at what we have going, and to ask ourselves, are we living the way that God commands us to? The higher, the greater, the better, the victorious, the gracious, the merciful, the loving life that you've called us to live, how does our life match up? I pray maybe even in the midst of this, God, we would be encouraged in areas that we're doing really good or areas we used to struggle with that we're still fighting through, God. Help us to continue to fight. We haven't given up yet. Fighting is good. Fighting means we're still trying to push forward through all this mess, God. But God, I pray you begin to drill deep down, deep, deep down inside of us, and to change us, mold us, God, into who you created us to be. God, I'm grateful for today. I'm grateful for this day. God, we pray for those who weren't able to be with us that aren't feeling well. God, I pray that you would heal their hearts, you would bring health and full restoration back to their lives, restore their bodies. God, give them sleep and rest. And God, I pray that you would bring all of us back together next week for a church lunch, you know, to hang out, to eat, to eat, to hang out, to wrap up Jude and just have a great afternoon of friendship and laughter and encouragement, God. We praise you for this day. We love you. Pray all this in Jesus' name. Everybody said, Amen, Amen.

The Book of Jude: Part 1

The Book of Jude

Part 1: The Call To Contend

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

Finished a series called the habits of a healthy heart. We did that for five weeks. And now we're starting a new series and something that we do here at Spring Valley Church is that we'll kind of go back and forth between a topical series and something more expositional, just going through verse by verse a book of the Bible. And that's what we're going to do now for the next three weeks. We're going into the book of Jude. If you've not heard of Jude, that's okay. It's like one of the shortest books in the Bible. It's tiny. It's the second to last book in the Bible. It's right before Revelations. And we are going to be diving in just three weeks and kind of the theme around Jude is contending for the faith. We'll get into what that means today. But I want you to, let me start with this question here. Can you think of a time in the church history where the truth of the gospel was under attack? Where the truth was taught by people whose lives actually promoted sin? A time in church history where the truth of the gospel was being polluted, where the truth had been hijacked for corrupt purposes and selfish gain. The reality is we may be thinking of multiple times in church history because this is a common problem and it was a problem all the way back in the early church. It existed even in the time of Jesus' ministry. As Jesus was going around, this problem started rising. And multiple authors in the New Testament had to address this issue. And Jude is one of those authors. He sees what's going on in the early church and says, "This is not okay. I got to say something about it.”

And so again, in our three-part series in Jude, we're going to look at how Jude calls believers to stand firm in their faith, to discern truth from falsehood, and to persevere and walk with God. And through this series, our hope is that we as a church will be inspired to live boldly for Jesus, living a life that is founded in truth and filled with hope. So before we again get into it, I just want to give a little bit more about the background is that Jude was originally going to write a long letter. We see these short letters and we're like, "What happened there? Everyone else's New Testament book is a little bit longer." So he was going to write something longer, but he saw the issue of this false teachers and he said, "I got to address it right away." So I'm going to write this short little memo, but it's still very thoughtful and very powerful. And what Jude does, pardon my voice, by the way, sickness is going through our family. Wife and baby aren't here because they're sick and I'm getting over it. So I'm here, don't worry. I'm okay. But this is new. I haven't sounded like this yet. So yeah, Jude in his message, he doesn't just get into how to address false teachers, but why we should address false teachers. Psychologists today have a preference for people understanding the why over understanding the how, because it reaches humans, it reaches us on a deeper level. By knowing the reasons behind events or behaviors, people feel more equipped to navigate situations more accurately. So Jude is saying, "Hey, you believers, you church, if you understand why these false teachers are doing what they're doing, you're going to be more motivated and better equipped to navigate those situations. Rather than me just telling you how to navigate it and how to do everything, let me tell you why." We see this in parenting often, right? At a certain age, there's a need to simply say, "Don't do this. This is how you do it." But when they get a little bit older, you start to tell them why we do it so that they can understand, so they can make that decision in the future on their own. "Wow, thank you so much. All the service. Lead pastor right there. That's a lead pastor just serving. Is there honey in it too? Just a little bit? Oh, there's not. Okay. That's just me. It's just our water. It's great water. Okay." It's like I said, when we parent, you tell your kids at a certain age why we do something because you want them to understand so that in other situations they can do it on their own. The why is important. We'll see in the next couple of weeks, Jude explains what is happening, why it is so important to address this and how to take action.

So if you guys want to open your Bibles or follow along on the screen, you're going to flip all the way to the end of your Bible. Well, not quite, Jude. I'm going to read the first four verses of Jude. Also, there's no chapters. I put one in there just so we don't confuse us if you're looking in your bulletin, but it's just one chapter. All right. One through four. It says, "Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James, to those who have been called who are loved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ, mercy, peace, and love be yours in abundance. Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt compelled to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God's holy people. For certain individuals whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are ungodly people who pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only sovereign Lord." Let's pray together. God, thank you again for our time. And God, I pray that you would be with us this morning and help us to understand your word and that we would understand why it is so important to have a true grasp of your gospel and why it is so important to constantly be growing in our faith and our understanding of who you are and what you do. And God, I pray that through your word this morning, we'd be drawn closer to you. We'd be encouraged to live boldly for you and that we would be filled with hope. We give this morning to you. We pray this in your name. Amen. All right, let me just drink a little bit more. This is good. Yes, thank you. This morning, just short verses right here.

There's a few truths that I want us to focus on and meditate on together. All right. So here's this, in the first two verses, we see Jude address our identity in Christ, our identity. As I mentioned before, we can learn something important about knowing the identity of Jude himself. So Jude says, "Is a brother of Jesus Christ." Well, he's a brother of James, but we know that James, we do some research. I did the research for you. James is a brother of Jesus. And so you're wondering, why didn't you just claim to be a brother of Jesus himself? I think it's showing humility, right? It'd be easy for us if we were the brother of Jesus. Wouldn't we want to put that on every book we wrote? To be like, "Hey, by the way, we all love him. You guys love him. You'll love me too. I'm the brother." But he shows humility by saying, "I'm a servant of Jesus." And there's really even a deeper story behind that. If we go to John 7-3, we understand that Jesus' family was not always so supportive of Jesus. It says in John 7-3, "Jesus' brother said to him, 'Leave Galilee.'" This is the brothers telling Jesus, "Leave Galilee and go to Judea so that your disciples there may see the works you do. No one who wants to become a public figure acts in secret. Since you are doing these things, show yourself to the world, for even his own brothers did not believe him." So they are mocking Jesus right here. Jude is one of the brothers that is mocking Jesus, saying, "I don't believe." If you want to go do this thing, go show the world who you think you are. They're not encouraging. We can read them and be like, "Oh, they just want him to go." No, they're mocking him. They're saying, "Go do your thing if you want to." They're doubting who he claims to be and saying, "Yeah, go show the world. Maybe they'll accept you." And so there's unbelief and there's a failure to understand who Jesus is and what his kingdom is about. And we don't know the story, but we now know that Jude wrote a book. So somewhere in between, there's a transformation that happened in him, going from doubt and disbelief to belief and the utmost belief to say, "I'm a servant of Jesus. I believe so much about who he is that I am wanting to be a part of his kingdom now." So what a beautiful picture of transformation and redemption. And he writes this knowing that other people will have felt the same way. They'll relate. They'll say, "I once had doubts. I didn't believe, but now I do." And he wants to strengthen their faith.

So then he turns his attention to the audiences, which is us, to our identity, to those who have been called, who are loved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ. Called, loved and kept. This is about the church then and it's about us today. Called shows that our salvation begins with God. Loved shows that his love, God's love for us is the foundation for everything that we do and how we live our life. And then we are kept. I love that. We will see how our eternal security can empower us to be bold in our faith. We don't have to fear anything in this world because we know that we have a future in heaven with God. You see, our identity changes as believers to be united with the person of Christ. This is our identity today. And other New Testament authors talk about this. Galatians 2 says, "I've been crucified with Christ. I no longer live, but Christ lives in me." 2 Corinthians 5 says, "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come, the old is gone, the new is here. All this from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ." So all throughout the New Testament, we see, and Jude puts it right here, so compactly as believers we are called, we are loved, and we are kept. Your entire spiritual life is initiated by God, is sustained by God, and your eternal future is promised and kept for by God. Our identity is found solely in him. We live in a world today that is vying to say, "Hey, put your identity in this. Put your identity in work, in your family, in your success, in sport," whatever it is, all these things that are vying for like, "Hey, plant your flag of identity, put it here." And Jesus is saying, "No, your whole identity is in me. Once you believe in me, your whole life has changed, all of it." So I just want this to wash over us today and to give us comfort, to be a good reminder, to give us security in our faith and hope for our future. So church, God has called you. God loves you, and God is keeping you. Your identity is aligned with Christ, who was the suffering servant, the one who loved the orphans and the widows, who ate meals with the outcasts and the rejects, who defeated sin, who conquered death, who ascended into heaven and is seated on the right hand of God. This is who our identity lies in. We are first reminded in just those first couple verses of our identity in Christ.

Then Jude moves on to something else. In verse 3, he gives us the need to contend. Says "Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt compelled to write and urge you to contend for the faith." He's being a good shepherd here, looking out for the flock of the church, and he knows that wolves are on the attack, threatening the flock, threatening the church, something that many of the disciples and the apostles addressed, giving the early church a playbook. Believers need to know their faith. They need to mature and grow in their faith, to truly understand what Jesus says is truth and what's not true. Other authors put it this way. Hebrews 6 says, "Therefore, let us move beyond the elementary teachings about Christ and be taken forward to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from accidentally to death and faith in God." Ephesians 4 says, "Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming." This one speaks to me. I'm a visual person. I don't know if you've ever been to the ocean and just been on an inner tube or floating out there, and you let the waves take you. They will take you. You will go farther and farther out, and you don't really have control. You're just letting the ocean take you where it is. That's what it can be like if we don't know our faith. The minute we hear something, we're like, "Oh, that sounds good," and we go in that direction. Someone else teaches this, "Oh, you know what? That sounds good too," and we're just being tossed back and forth. In this analogy, Jesus is saying, "I want you to be anchored. I don't want the waves to take wherever they're taking you. I want you to know what is true. I want you to stay right there." What does it mean to contend? To contend for the faith. Well, the word in Greek here really means to convey a struggle, a wrestling match. And we're not so much wrestling with someone else as much as we're wrestling with our faith to understand it more. We have to know that the faith we have in God is something that is living. It's not static. It's a relationship with God, and as we grow and we know more about God, there'll be things in the faith that are new, and we need to wrestle with those things. We have to wrestle with situations that arise where we know the truth of God, hey, to love other people. And we find ourselves in one situation, and we figure out, "All right, in this situation, this is how I love other people." But then, maybe 10 years down the road, you find yourself in a new situation. You say, "I need to love. I don't know how to love these people. I knew how to do it in that situation, but I need to wrestle again with the faith to figure out what it means to love others in this situation." Here's a couple of tools to keep in your back pocket when we talk about contending for the faith. As you wrestle with Scripture, remember these things. One, always use Scripture to understand Scripture. Does that make sense? Use Scripture to understand Scripture. If you read one passage and you say, "I think this is what this is saying," go find other passages that talk about the same thing and see if that is true. The Bible is consistent. It will not say, "Do this thing," and then do the complete opposite. So use Scripture to understand Scripture. Next, ask the Spirit to help you discern. Pray about it. "God, is this what you're telling me to do? Is this what your word is saying? I think in this situation, I understand your truth from the Bible, and I want to apply it in this way. Is this what you want me to do?" He'll tell you. And then use the body of Christ. Use the church. We all have different experiences that the Bible tells us the body of believers is made up of different parts to help each other. You may have lived through a certain situation that I haven't been through yet, and I'm going to go to you and say, "Hey, what did you do? How did you walk through that in such a Christ-like manner? Tell me how to do that. We're here for each other. How did you apply God's truth in that conversation? That was a hard conversation you had. How did you do that?" So he's urging the early church to wrestle with their beliefs, to understand how some things are true and some things are clearly not true. The call here is for believers to be proactive in their faith, not passive and nonchalant, but proactive in their faith. This faith we have, this gift of salvation, this relationship with God that we have is precious, it's powerful, and it needs to be prioritized in our lives.

So why do we do this? When we aren't proactive in doing these things, Jude addresses what may happen if this doesn't occur, and that is the threat of false teachers in our faith communities. Verse 4 says, "For certain individuals whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are ungodly people who pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only sovereign Lord." There's a reality that within church, people don't know the truth and don't understand the truth. That's a given. The scarier truth is that there are people who will rise up in leadership and start to preach and teach not truth, falsehoods. And we as a church are to hold each other accountable. If Pastor Chris or I ever got up here and said something that was a heresy, I would hope that you guys would see that, hear that, and do something about it. That you guys would not be just tossed to and from and be like, "I guess what he said is true even though the Bible clearly says otherwise." No, you guys, yeah, come on, call us out if that ever happens. And that's what wasn't happening in the early church. These churches didn't know the truth, didn't wrestle with their faith to understand, so that when false teachers got up, they were just going along with it like, "Oh, okay, sure." It's a scary truth when this happens because those people, Jude makes it clear, they're doing this knowingly. These false teachers do it knowingly. They know that what they're saying is a lie, that they are perverting the truth of the gospel and that they are giving license to sin. Their false gospel doesn't just allow it but might even encourage people to sin and also deny Christ. Here's a couple of thoughts. Next week, Pastor Lauren's going to really get into a lot of false teaching, so I'm only going to give like a tease right here because her section of Jude is all about it. But here's a couple of things to remember about false teachers from this one verse. False teachers can be subtle. It says they slipped in, right? This wasn't a came in with a big like, "Oh, we should have known because it was..." No, they slip in. It's subtle. While sometimes their teaching is outright wrong, oftentimes it twists the truth. So there's a nugget of truth in there, but they twisted in some way. And so you recognize like, "Oh, that part of it, yeah, that sounded good." And then some other part is obviously wrong. But it's small and it can be subtle. Something like, "Hey, a closer relationship to God should mean me experiencing more blessing in my life." You hear that and you're like, "Okay, not necessarily wrong, but I have some follow-up questions. What does that mean?" Are we just talking health and wealth prosperity gospel here? Are we just talking about God's going to be good to me despite whatever I go through? It can be small. We have to be careful. We need to be proactive in listening to what is being taught. We need to know the truth in order to recognize the falsehoods. This is why Paul writes in 2 Timothy 4, it says, "Preach the word. Be prepared in season and out of season. Correct, rebuke, and encourage with great patience and careful instruction for the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine." He's already saying this is going to happen. "Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them with great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. But you, keep your head in all situations. Endure hardship. Do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry." You cannot just show up to church and just listen and like half listen and be like, "All right, got my fill of Jesus. I'm good." No, you need to listen, do the work, compare what we say to scripture, make sure that this is exactly, this is lining up with what God has said in his word. All right, so first false teachers can be subtle. False teachers look at the fruit they produce in their life.

John 15 talks about abiding in Christ and we'll know, the Bible tells us that we don't know the heart of every person. We're not meant to know exactly their heart status and if they're saved or not saved, but we can look at the fruit of their lives to say, "Hey, are they showing the fruit of the spirit? Are they loving? Are they kind? Are they patient? Are they compassionate?" If we see those things, we can be like, "Hey, I think that maybe they're a believer. Maybe they're following Jesus because their life looks like it." For those false teachers, look at the fruit of their life. If they're saying one thing, but they treat people terribly, or look at how they treat the poor. Look at how they treat those who are struggling. There's signs there that could be like, "Hmm, they say one thing and they sound kind of good, but their whole life just seems like a wreck. Their life doesn't have it together. They're not loving other people like Jesus would love people." Paul says in Romans, "I urge you, brothers and sisters, to watch out for those who cause divisions and put obstacles in your way. They're contrary to the teaching that you have learned. Keep away from them, for such people are not serving our Lord Christ, but their own appetites. By smooth talk and flattery, they deceive the minds of naive people." Again, Bible tells us there are going to be false teachers and they're going to deceive people. So the warning is, look out for false teachers. Also, don't be the one with naive minds, right? We want to mature in faith. We want to grow in our faith. Peter says, "But there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them, bringing swift destruction on themselves." I once was at a pastors conference, and this is a room full of pastors, and someone was speaking to us. And I remember being a little bit shocked, because his message was, even in this room right now, and there was probably 3,000 of us pastors in this room, he's like, "Even among us, there are Judases in this room. People who are preaching, who think that they may be okay, or who know that they are preaching falsehoods. It is a reality that we deal with. We have to be vigilant, knowing we have to know the truth. And we have to know, that way, when we know the truth, this is a tease, this is going to get into next week, when we know the truth, we'll better recognize what's false. So, so important to know the gospel. And again, we're talking about inside the church, right? This is not, of course, there are false beliefs out in the world, that's to be expected. But inside the church, there are still going to be challenges that we face when it comes to false teaching, and heresies that lead people away from Jesus. And I think I've used this analogy before, but even if it's just a degree off, you think of being out at sea, and just a degree off, well over many, many miles, you're going to end up this far apart. Even though, it was just a degree off from the truth. And that's true of the gospel too. You hear someone's teaching, you're like, "That's just, it's a little bit off." That plays out in life, and they are miles away from Jesus.

So, in the opening verses here, just the four verses, we see that Jude has reinforced believers to understand their identity in Christ. He's encouraged them to be proactive and wrestle with their faith. And he warns them of false teachers. I want to end today with a question for us to think about this week. How can you, today, live as one called, loved, and kept by God in a culture of compromise? Are you secure in God's call in your life? Do you see that your identity is found in him first and foremost? Or is your identity compromised because you're wrapped up in, fill in the blank, or you're wrapped up in your job, your role as a parent, found in your success? It can be good things, but they can't be the first thing. Our identity has to be in Christ. Do you live every day firm in your understanding of his love for you? Are you loving others because God first loved you? Are you living as someone who is deeply loved? There's a saying out there, you know, hurt people hurt other people. Well, the opposite is true, too. People who are loved are better at loving others. Guys, we're loved by God. And we have a responsibility to love those around us. Keep the question up there. Keep it up there for the rest of the time. Do you have hope that emboldens you to live for Christ in every situation? Uncertainty in the future can bring up fear and anxiety. But because we know that God has us, that he's sustaining us, that he has the most perfect future for us, we can live confidently knowing that no matter what happens around us, God's got us. How can you live as one called, loved, and kept? And then in a culture of compromise, you guys know this, we live in a world today of, hey, live your truth, you do you. What, well, all the other sayings that include compromise. You know, when no one's looking, we think we can live a certain life, but maybe we just feel the pressure to do that when we're in front of other people. But when no one's looking, we live a different way. Or we think, hey, it's just this one time. Or it's not that often. We all have our things that we get into. Hey, I go to church on Sunday, so that's good. That gives me some freedom for the way I live my life the other six days of the week. Or we say things like, hey, no one's perfect, so we all have a past in a way. I don't have to do the entire Christian life, just overall I have to lean that way. I gotta make sure I kind of head in that direction. But I don't have to be pursuing Jesus with my everything. We say it out loud, and you're like, oh, that doesn't sound great. But we say these in our head, and we're like, oh, I mean, yeah, kind of. And it can even creep into our churches and how we live life as a church, as a body of believers. And we don't want that. We want this to be a place of intentionality, of purpose. That we are together, and individually, but together as a church, giving our everything, striving for, sprinting towards Jesus with everything that we have. We want to live as people who are called, loved, and kept, despite the culture of compromise. We don't want compromise to come into this church at all. As believers who know the truth, the truth of the gospel, this is capital T, truth, we can't compromise on that. We cannot compromise on the belief that we have in Jesus and how we are supposed to live. The words that we say, the actions that we carry out, the faith that is inside of us should all align with scripture. And if we don't understand it, we should seek to understand and figure it out.

So this week, again, just want to leave you with this. How can you live as one who is called, loved, and kept by God in a culture of compromise? Before we pray, I want to fast forward to the end and read this doxology that Jude writes at the very end that we're going to cover in the third week. But I think it's such a perfect wrap up to, now that we have learned a bit about the situation, his words mean so much more. So it says this, "To him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy, to the only God, our savior, be glory, majesty, power, and authority through Jesus Christ our Lord before all ages, now and forevermore." Amen? Let's pray. God, thank you again for your word, for your truth that is uncompromising. God, I pray that you would help us to better understand how to live a life that is for you in all situations. And God, I pray that you would help us to know your truth, that we would grow in knowing your truth. And so when those false teachings come in front of us, whether we're scrolling social media and we hear something or someone says something and says, "Hey, doesn't Jesus say this?" And if it is at all false, we can know, say, "Actually, no, he doesn't." No, that's not what the Bible says. No, what it means to live like Jesus or to love like Jesus actually means this. God, we want to be witnesses for your kingdom, witnesses for your truth, a light in the darkness. And I pray that you would help us to grow in our faith and our understanding of who you are and what you do, that you would embolden us, God. Give us hope. Give us comfort. Give us peace. God, use us and give you all the praise and glory. Amen.

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.

Pre-Decide: Part 2

Pre-Decide: Part 2 - I AM READY

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

If I haven't met you, I am Pastor Lauren, and we are on week two of our Pre-decide series. So we started this new series last week where we're talking about making a pre-decision for how we are going to head into 2024. And I don't know about you, but I don't know anyone who like plans to be 40 pounds overweight, or plans to file bankruptcy, or plans to, I don't know, bring chaos to their family. But I think there's some of us that don't have a plan not to. So we're gonna talk about that today. We're gonna talk about having a plan not to do these things. 'Cause you don't ever have a plan to wreck your life, but we wanna make sure we have a plan not to wreck our lives. Last week, we talked about the power of decision and pre-deciding and how the quality of your decisions determines the quality of your life. When you make decisions, which we do, we make thousands of decisions every day, those add up to a life. And so if you're not a great decision maker, that's gonna have a big impact on your life. When we harness the power of pre-deciding and making good decisions, it builds up and creates a good life. Pastor Chris had this kind of formula for us that when we are faced with, fill in the blank situation, we are pre deciding to take this action. When faced with this temptation, when faced with this obstacle, I have pre decided to do XYZ. And that's gonna be specific to each of us. we'll all have individual situations and fill in those blanks differently. But it's kind of this formula for us to pre-decide. So over the next few weeks, it's a six week series, and we're gonna talk about different aspects of this. We're gonna talk about being ready. I am ready. I am consistent. I am devoted. I am generous, I am faithful, I am a finisher. So, Fast Chris challenged us last week to be here. If you're online, what's up, hello, welcome. So glad you're here, but if you can be here in person, make that a priority. Be here every Sunday, because this is going to set us up for 2024, and maybe for longer. I believe that, I believe it's going to bring an impact beyond this year. But if you can be here, be here. Because as we go through this, we're gonna see that our decisions are not based on what feels good in the moment, but who we want to be for the rest of our lives. We should be making decisions just on momentary satisfaction or what feels good to us. This is the lesson I'm trying to teach my children right now. It is easier said than done. But when our values are clear, the decisions we make will be easier. Not always easy, but easier. When we are honed in on our values and we know exactly who we are, whose we are, and what those values are, if they are in alignment with scripture, it's gonna make the decisions so much easier.

Who has given into temptation before? Let's just be honest. Yep, mm-hmm, okay. Who has regretted it? Yeah, yeah, me too, mm-hmm. We've all been there. Why do you think that is though? Why do you think we knew we weren't supposed to do it, but we did it anyway. So why do you think we gave into that? Because we weren't ready. I'll just, spoiler alert. It was because we weren't ready. We weren't prepared. One of our main passages today is 1 Corinthians 16, 13. Paul is writing to the church in Corinth and he says, "Be on your guard, stand firm in the faith, be courageous, be strong, be on your guard." You gotta be ready. Matthew 26, 41 says, "Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." I think a lot of the time we have good intentions. Like I said, we don't plan to wreck our lives, but we're human. We make mistakes, we're weak. So we need to watch and pray. So that's where we're gonna pre-decide to be ready. We're gonna have our guard up. We're gonna be watching. We're gonna be praying. I got two main reasons why this is super important. All right? The first one, The devil is coming for you. Sound like a fire and brimstone preacher here. The devil's coming for you. But I think in our modern Western Christianity, we have significantly downplayed the spiritual realm. We kind of just go about our lives forgetting that there are angels. There is an enemy who is evil, who has schemes that his main mission is to steal and kill and destroy. That is his goal. He wants us to be distracted. He wants us to not be in relationship with God. He wants us to be living in sin. That is his goal. Again, Paul, but in 2 Corinthians this time, he says, "I wrote to you so that Satan "The man will not outsmart us, for we are familiar with his evil schemes." We're not unaware. We know he's out there, but I think sometimes we forget it. We let our guard down. But he's studying you. He knows you. He knows where you're weak. He knows where you're vulnerable. He knows what's tempting and what's not for you. He knows where you struggle. He is the father of lies, and he is going to lie to you and convince you that what you think is best or what your flesh wants is what is best. Paul, again, we're just BFFs with Paul today. Paul talks about the armor of God in Ephesians. He's writing to the church in Ephesus and he talks about armoring up. He uses the image of Roman soldiers armor to compare it to how we can protect ourselves spiritually.

Ephesians 6:10-11 says, "Finally, be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power, put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes." Again, we know they're coming. It is not a matter of if the devil is scheming or if he's going to come after us. He is coming, so we might as well be prepared. Growing up every day, my mom would have us kids put on the armor of God. We'd go from head to toe. And so I do it with my kids in our family Bible time in the morning. We go helmet of salvation, breastplate of righteousness, the belt of truth, our feet ready to spread the gospel of peace, the shield of faith and the sword of the spirit every morning. Because it's a reminder, one, that we have the power from Holy Spirit to be ready for battle. We are given his power. If you are a follower of Jesus, you have the power to combat the evil schemes. And also it's a reminder to be on our guard, to be ready, to armor up, to be prepared. So number one, the devil is coming for you. Number two, you are not as strong as you think. Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but same here, I'm not as strong as I think. We think we got this. I'm not gonna fall into that sin again. I'm not gonna be fooled by the enemy. It's fine, I got this. Well, it's funny 'cause God knew we'd think like this and he wrote, so if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don't fall. If you think you are standing firm, be careful. Now there are times we are gonna be able to resist temptation. We are going to be able to stand firm, but it's only by his power and his strength. Let's not get cocky. Let's not get overly confident unless it's in him. Studies are actually showing that we are overconfident, that we overestimate our ability to resist temptation. restraint bias, meaning you think you can resist or restrain yourself more than you actually can.

This is not great news for us at the beginning of the year when we're all setting resolutions, I'm sorry. But there is hope, I promise. It's kinda like when maybe you're at the office and it's someone's birthday, which it seems like there's always someone's birthday, and someone brings in a cake and you're like, "No, I'm not gonna have the cake." And you sing happy birthday and you celebrate, and that's fine, but you say no thank you to the cake. and then someone comes by your desk and they're like, "Oh hey, did you get some cake?" Oh no, no, no, I'm good, thanks. And then you walk by the break room and they're like, "Dang it, there's still cake left." Nope, nope, I'm not gonna have cake. By the end of the day, you've had two pieces and you're like, "How did this happen? "I wasn't gonna have any." You thought you were stronger than you were. And why is that? Why do we think we're stronger than we are? It's because we have a limited capacity. for decision making. We overestimate because it takes energy to resist temptation. It takes energy to make decisions. So when you're making these positive decisions over and over and over again, your energies are being depleted. Your emotional energy, your mental energy, your spiritual energy, you're just getting depleted. And eventually the part of your brain that controls good decision making and willpower wears out and is just tired. And so we give in. And I use the cake example, but it's gonna look different for all of us. Maybe you fight the temptation all day long to not take your anger out on your coworkers and you come home and you take it out on the dog. Or you yell at the kids. Maybe you're spending all of your energy fighting the sweets and those temptations, you go home and you end up binging on whatever snacky thing you can find in the back of the pantry. Our self-control and our willpower are limited resources. So if we pre-decide, the more we pre-decide, how we are going to respond in those situations, the easier it will be. So the double is coming for you and you're not as strong as you think. Those are the two main reasons we need to be ready. So practically speaking, what does this look like? Okay, we know why we should be ready, but how? How do we get ready? Other than the armor of God we talked about. Well, we're going to do a few things. We're gonna move the line, we're gonna magnify the cost, and we're gonna plan the escape. Move the line, magnify the cost, plan your escape 'cause we have an enemy and he's coming and we're gonna be ready for him. So move the line, what does this look like? We got some tape here, all right? A little illustration for us today. Okay, so here's our line. All right, this side of the line is sin. This is where we don't wanna be, right? We fight it, we fight it, we fight it. We don't wanna be here. We know we're not supposed to be here. This side of the line is where we're supposed to be. Following the Bible, following God's will. We're not falling into sin. We're doing good. But what do we do? What do most of us do, right? How close can I get to the line? Can I touch it? We wanna get as close to the line as we can without going over, I'm not sinning. It's like the little sibling that's like, I'm not touching her, I'm not touching her, I'm not touching her. How close can we get to the line? You know, when Chris and I were dating, you know, we love Jesus, but we're also hormonal teenagers, so it's like, how close can we get to the physical line without crossing any barriers? Any boundaries we shouldn't cross, right? If you survived '80s and '90s purity culture, you understand what I'm talking about, right? Okay, yeah. How close can I get to the line? Maybe, again, the eating well analogy. Maybe you're like, I'm just gonna have the salad, but you go to Cheesecake Factory. Nothing wrong with Cheesecake Factory. I love me some cheesecake, but I'm just saying.

You get as close to the line. Maybe you know there's certain websites you shouldn't look at, or certain social media accounts you shouldn't be looking at. But you just scroll anyways, alone, maybe at night, when no one's watching. I'm not looking at those, but you're still scrolling. You're still getting really close. You're setting yourself up for failure. We shouldn't ask how close to the line we can get. We should ask how far away from the line can I stay? How far away from the line of sin can I stay? What barriers can I have in place to protect me? We don't do this with like really big things, right? Like when you're flying, you really hope your pilot is not like, I wonder how much fuel, Like how little fuel I can use to get there without killing us, right? Or like, how close can I get to that 2,000 foot tower without like nicking it? You really hope your pilot's not doing that. Or like my kids, you know, they like to ride bikes or do scooters or whatever outside. I don't tell them, okay guys, there's a car coming, you wait until it gets as close as possible and then you get out of the way. We're not playing Frogger here, like this isn't chicken, right? We're trying to keep them safe. You see a car coming, you hold tail and you get out of there. You stay far away, you go up in the yard, you go up on the porch, you get as far away, you set barriers. You move the line. I am putting distance between me and that temptation. Again, it looks different for all of us. Maybe it's spending, he got the spiritual gift of add to cart. So maybe that looks like you giving your Amazon password to your best friend and you cannot check out until you get your password back. Maybe it's scrolling social media and you gotta set some limits on there. Some timers, the app kicks you out or you got an accountability partner that checks in with you. Those websites, man, you can lock those down. You can set up accountability. Stepping on some toes today, I'm sure, but stick with me here. I'm just the messenger, I promise. We're creating barriers between you and this sin. And you might be like, "Lauren, this feels so restrictive. There's rules. I don't like rules." I don't either. Don't put me in a box. Don't give me restrictions. But I promise you these boundaries that the Lord gives us in His word, they're good. And there is so much freedom within the boundaries. There's so much freedom in here. The boundary lines, sorry, David, thought it was Paul again.

David says in Psalms, "The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places. Surely I have a delightful inheritance." God's got a delightful inheritance for us. But if we're trying to live outside of his boundaries, we don't get to have that. We don't get to partake in that delightful inheritance. The boundaries may look restrictive. At times they may feel restrictive or inconvenient, but they are good. It is pleasant and delightful and there's so much freedom to be had there. When we are living within these pre-decided boundaries, we expend less energy 'cause we're not making the decision over and over and over again. And we already know exactly what we're gonna do. We're ready, we're prepared. So we're gonna move the line.

Number two, we're gonna magnify the cost. This is where you take whatever situation maybe you struggle with and you play it out, you magnify the cost, take it all the way. Maybe let's do health. You deal with gluttony and you overeat and you don't get it in check and you don't take it to God and you keep overeating and then it becomes an issue. Maybe there's strain on your relationships with your spouse or your kids or your family and then maybe you start having health issues and you start seeing your doctor more than you're at work. You get really, really sick. Maybe it's something like infidelity. No one's going to know. It's not going to hurt anybody. It's just between me and this other person. No. It could wreck your marriage. It could destroy your relationship with your kids. It could compromise your integrity, your job. So many repercussions. Take it out, work it out so you see what could happen. When you walk it all the way out, it puts it in perspective so that you are more inclined to fight that sin. Numbers 32, 23 says, "You will be sitting against the Lord "and you may be sure that your sin will find you out." and come out one way or the other. So magnify the cost.

Number three, plan your escape. We are not just sitting ducks. We don't have to just be waiting with nothing to prepare for. We can be ready with a plan. There's a story in Genesis, you might be familiar with it. the story of Joseph and his brother sold him into slavery. And he ended up going to Egypt and being sold to a man, his name was Potiphar, he was a very powerful man. And he was raised up to like the manager of his household. He was like very important in this man's household. Well, Genesis 39 says, "Joseph was a very handsome and well-built young man and Potiphar's wife soon began to look at him lustfully. "Come and sleep with me," she demanded. So apparently Joseph was a strapping young man that caught the eye of Potiphar's wife, and she was tempting him. But he knew that that was not okay. Now it would have been easy for him, you know, they were all alone, he had some sort of level of power in this house, no one would need to find out. He was young and single, why not? But he knew that that was not what was right. You know, something else I think we do that maybe we don't realize we do, is we justify our disobedience because of our disappointment. Maybe we blame God for the situation that we're in. We're like, well, he put me here, so I'm just gonna live it up. I'm just gonna do what I'm gonna do. My job doesn't pay me enough, so I'm just gonna put it on the credit card. My spouse isn't giving me what I need, so I'm gonna find what I need. It's God's fault, he put me here. And we blame him. But we can't use our disappointments to justify our disobedience. Joseph said, "No, yes, I was sold into slavery. "I'm not in my home country. "I don't know, or I am not near my family. "I don't know how they're doing. "I'm all alone here in this foreign land." He could have blamed God. He could have said, "Forget it. "Why should I keep following you? "Why should I keep doing things the way you want me to?" But he had a plan of escape. It goes on to say, or sorry, day after day, she hit on him. And so one day she grabbed his coat and said, "Come to bed with me." And he said, but he left his cloak in her hand and ran out of the house. He knew that if he stuck around, he might not be able to continue to fight the temptation 'cause the devil likes to wear us down. He's gonna keep coming at us and we're gonna maybe get that decision fatigue. But if we have a plan, it's gonna be a lot easier. And he had a plan. If she grabs my coat, I am out of here. Better to have a good name than a good coat. He knew what he was going to do. Back to 1 Corinthians, it says, "And God is faithful. He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted," not if, when, "When you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it." The key to that though is the first part, it says, and God is faithful. He's the one who's going to give us the way out. He's the one who's gonna give us the strength because of his faithfulness. He's not trying to set us up for failure. He's not trying to see us steeped in sin and struggling. He is faithful. He is good. He is going to provide a way out.

So we gotta pre-decide that when the devil attacks in whatever area is specific to us, we have an escape plan. No one plans to fail, but few plan not to. So be honest about it with yourself. Be honest where you're vulnerable, where there's weak spots and cracks in your armor that the devil could get into, 'cause those flaming arrows are coming. figure out what those barriers need to be. Where's the other line you need to draw? And what barriers can you put in place between you and the temptation? Kind of a silly illustration, but I think it proves or illustrates the point. Last year, I had been doing some research on gluten and the effects of wheat and on our bodies and such. and I thought, you know, I should try gluten-free. I should try that diet. Should see how it does, how it impacts my body. But for those that don't know, I was pregnant for most of 2023, and so changing your diet drastically when you're pregnant is not easy or fun, so I didn't. But I tried, I will say that, I tried. There were some times I'm like, you know what, I'm just gonna lessen the amount of gluten I'm eating, just to kinda see how I feel. Doesn't really work that way. Or, my favorite, is I would say, okay, I'm gonna try gluten-free. I'm gonna see how it goes. But I make our own sourdough, and sourdough's like, it processes all the gluten, and so like, or most of it. So like, I'm just gonna have just the sourdough. I make it at home, it's fine. Like, I'm just gonna have the sourdough. That's it, that's the only gluten I'm gonna have, okay? But then what happens? You say, okay, I'm gonna have the sourdough. But then I go to an event, and I'm like, oh, there's dessert there. Okay, I'm just gonna have one dessert, since I already have the sourdough anyways, it's fine, but then I'm gonna get back to it. But then Friday night rolls around and it's family pizza night, and the place we're getting pizza doesn't have gluten-free crust. Well, of course I'm gonna have the pizza. I already have the sourdough and the dessert, so I'll just go gluten-free tomorrow, it's fine. Do you know what happens when you're on a gluten-free diet and you keep making decisions to eat gluten? You're not on a gluten-free diet anymore. You're just not. It didn't work. I needed accountability. I needed to say, I'm not doing the sourdough. I'm not having the desserts at the event. I'm gonna find gluten-free pizza crust. I'm gonna have it in my house ready to go.

I had to set up those lines. I had to draw my line over here because I was trying real hard to be here and I kept stepping over. There's a pastor that shared, he wanted to just be clear and above reproach and that he was married and he was faithful and he didn't want any temptations to cause him to stumble. So he had his technology was locked down, password protected. He didn't travel alone, he didn't stay in hotels alone. You know, he always had like some sort of companion to go with. He said it was to the point that it was inconvenient and annoying. One time he went on a search engine to book a hot air balloon ride for his teenage son. He couldn't do it because his search engine was locked down to the point he couldn't Google the word hot. It was a little inconvenient, right? But it was worth it to him. He didn't want anything to be in his way. He's like, I wanna be as far away from that line as I can. The inconvenience is worth it to do it God's way. Why resist temptation over and over again in the future when you have the power to eliminate it today? Now we can't eliminate it altogether. We can't plan for every scenario we're going to face, but we sure can make it easier on ourselves. We can limit it. we can reduce the likelihood that we'll give in. The devil is going to attack and you're not as strong as you think you are. We are not as strong as we think we are without the power of the Holy Spirit. When your values are clear, your decisions are easier. Be clear on those values. Know what the word of God says. If you don't know, get in the word. Check out the Psalms, check out the Proverbs, check out the Gospels where Jesus is literally walking the earth and teaching his disciples how to live. When we're tired and we're overwhelmed or we're discouraged or we're just going through a really hard season, our barriers are down, our guards are down and it's so much easier for the devil to attack. So be aware of that. Know that that is the case. Be on your guard. And when we're on our guard and we're ready, the decisions won't be based on the emotions in the moment, but on the values that God has given us. Amen. Say be ready. I am ready.

All right, pray with me. Jesus, thank you for your word. Thank you that you have given us these boundary lines in pleasant places, God, that you have given us so much freedom within these boundary lines to live and worship and play and love and you are so good to us. You give us these things for our good and for your glory. God, may we make a plan. May we have a plan of escape. May we set up roadblocks and move our lines so that we aren't tempted to fall into sin. Help us to be ready. Help us to armor up. 'Cause we know there is a real enemy out there who wants to come for our souls, God. Remind us that we have your power within us to fight those battles. We can't do it on our own. We weren't created to do it on our own, but we can do it with you. The power that you have given us, that you have put in us, that raised Jesus from the dead, lives in us. May we be ready. In Jesus' name, Amen.