Rick Warren - What to Do When You Cause a Storm — Part One

Hey, have you ever felt like you were the wrong person for the job.

You know you didn't have enough experience, the right skill set. Well,

I know I have and you probably have too. This is Pastor Rick's

Daily Hope, the audio broadcast ministry of Pastor Rick Warren. Now today we're

beginning a new series called The Manifestation of Your Life Mission. Pastor Rick is

gonna show us that no matter how big or daunting the thing is that God

is calling us to do, we don't have to run away from it.

We can embrace it. We sure hope you'll invite a friend to listen along

with you today as we discover how to embrace God's calling on our lives and

how we can live according to His plan and purpose. Now here's Rick with

part one of a message called what to do when you cause a storm.

You weren't put on earth to live for yourself. You need a bigger God

than you. You were made for a greater purpose. Then simply make money,

retire and die. No, no, no, no. God didn't

create you just to live for yourself. You were planned for God's purpose.

You were shaped to serve God. You are created in His image, and

you're made for a mission. This mission is what gives your life meaning.

Now, everybody has a mission in life, a God given mission in life.

Unfortunately most people never discover it. Now let me show you some verses

here on the screen. The Bible says in Ephesians two, verse ten,

God made each of us what we are. In other words, you're unique.

There's nobody like you in the whole world, in the past, president

of the future. You're shaped for a particular mission. God made each of

us what we are, and in Christ Jesus, God made us to do

good works. Now that good works is your contribution in the world while you're

on this planet, and that's called your mission. God made us to do

good works, which God planned in advance for us to live our lives doing.

Before you even born, God had already thought up why he was making

you, and he made you for a mission. As I said, most

people never learn their mission, never fulfill their mission, never complete their mission,

and so they go through life kind of drifting. Now the Bible has

this to say. Jesus said in John seventeen, in the same way that

the Father gave me a mission in the world, I give you a mission

in the world. There's nobody alive who doesn't have a mission that God created

them for in life. Jesus also said this in Mark chapter eight. If

you insist on living for yourself, you're going to lose your life. In

other words, you're going to waste the whole purpose of your life. Only

those who give away their lives for My sake, the sake of the good

news that's part of your mission, will ever know what it means to really

live. Until you know your life mission, you're just existing. It doesn't

have the full meaning that God intended for your life. And that's why Paul

says this in Acts chapter twenty. The most important thing Paul says, is

that I complete my mission, the work that the Lord Jesus gave me.

Now this is so important that I'm going to spend the entire next month teaching

you about your life mission. And it's very important. You don't want to

miss any of the next four weeks. And we're actually going to use a

guy in the Bible named Jonah as an example. But you have a calling

in life. It's what God intends for you to do with your life,

and it nothing matters more so, do you know your life mission? Are

you completing it right now? If not, hang around because I'm going to

help you now. I titled this the manifestation of your life. Mission.

Manifestation is not a word we use a lot today. It's an old English

word, but it's used all through the Bible. And what it means is

one day, it's going to be very clear to everybody whether you fulfilled your

mission or not. There's going to be a day of accountability. There's going

to be a day of judgment. And the Bible says everybody is going to

see my mission and your mission and see whether we did anything about it or

not. Here's what the Bible says. First Corinthians, chapter three, verses

ten to fourteen. Each one of us should be careful how we build our

lives. Okay, we're all building lives. Okay, we're all building our

lives now. The only true foundation for building is Jesus Christ. Now,

most of you you already got this, okay. Jesus Christ is the foundation

of your life. So you're a believer, you're a follower, you're a

Christian, and you got the right foundation. But you can have the right

foundation still build the wrong structure. And that's what he talking about here.

He says we should all be careful how we build our lives. The only

true foundation for building is Jesus Christ. But be careful in choosing what building

materials you use on that foundation. Now, he says, you get a

choice and what you're going to build your life on. You can build with

values that last forever, like gold, silver, and jewels. In other

words, ten thousand years from the day, gold will still be gold,

silver will still be silver, it won't have rusted. Precious jewels will still

be there. They're not going to burn up, they're not going to rust.

They are timeless. So you can build on timeless values that last forever,

like gold, silver and jewels, or you can build your life with

values that burn up and won't last, like wood and hay and straw.

So I go out here and I build a structure with would hay to straw.

It's not going to be here in fifty years, much less one thousand

or ten thousand years. It's going to burn up. Now, one day

you're work on earth, that's your mission will be inspected by God, inspected

on the day of judgment, and God will test it by fire, so

that the quality of your work. That's the quality of your life. The

quality of your life mission is manifested. What does that mean? Everybody can

see it. It's perfectly clear whether you wasted your life or you used it

effectively, whether the quality of your work is manifested, and all will see

the true value of what you accomplished with your life. That's that's your mission.

Now, if your work survives the fire, if your mission survives the

fire, you will receive your reward. This is eternal reward in heaven.

But if your work is burned up, you'll lose your reward, even though

you yourself will be saved like someone barely escaping a fire. Now, what's

he saying here. He's not to talking about your salvation. If you have

Jesus Christ the foundation of your life, you cannot lose your salvation. You

can lose rewards. You cannot lose your salvation because it's a gift to you.

You didn't work for it, so you can't unwork for it. So

you're going If you have Christ as the foundation of your life, you're going

to heaven. He's not talking about that. He's saying that in heaven that

God is going to give rewards for how well you used your life. Did

you make it count, did you fulfill your mission? Did you do what

God puts you on earth to do? Did you even care enough to find

out about what God put you here on earth to do? And he says,

if you do a pretty good job of it, there's going to be

rewards in heaven. But he says, if I don't do a good job,

or I don't even care to learn my mission, he said, I'm

going to lose the rewards. I'll be in heaven, but I will lose

the rewards. See how important this is. That's why I'm going to spend

an entire month as your pastor who loves you, as your personal spiritual coach.

I want you to pass that exam. I want you to get the

rewards in heaven that God has already planned for you. Now, there are

three ways you can learn in life. You can learn by you can learn

by explanation. You can learn by experience, and you can learn by example.

A lot of what we learn in life we learned by explanation. You

go to school and somebody teaches you how to do math. They explain math,

and you know how to do math, they explain a language, you

learn a language. They explain history, You learn history. A lot of

stuff we learned through explanation. Then some things you can only learn in life

by experience. It's the only way you're going to learn it. And you

learn those things sometimes the hard way, through experience. But there are some

things in life you should never learn by experience. God doesn't want you to

learn evil by experience. God doesn't want you to learn that abuse is painful

by being abused. There are a lot of things God does not want you

to learn from experience. The easiest way to learn is to learn by example.

And you can learn from good examples, and you can learn from bad

examples. Successes and failures can both teach you. It's wise to learn from

experience, But it's actually wiser to learn from the experiences of others. Why

because then you don't have to go through all the pain. Then you don't

have to go through all of the difficulty. Then you don't have it doesn't

take so much time, it's a whole lot faster. Learning from the experiences

of others is not only less painful, it's faster. I don't have enough

time in life to learn everything. By making a mistake. No, that

didn't work. There isn't enough time in life to learn everything by experience,

so you have to learn some stuff through the experiences of others. And that's

why we're going to take this book called the Book of Jonah, and we're

going to learn from the good and the bad experiences of his life mission.

Because Jonah was a guy who the first half of his life he totally blew

it, totally blew it, missed his life mission. But in the second

part of his story, he gets on track and it ends up good.

It ends up well. Now, Jonah in the Bible is called a minor

prophet, one of twelve minor profits in the Old Testament, not because he's

less important, because it just means it's a short book. It's only four

chapters. Each week for the next four weeks, we're going to look at

one chapter of Jonah as we learn about your life mission. All right,

let's look at lessons from Jonah about your life mission. And there are ten

lessons that we're going to look at. Some of these are so simple I

can just state them. I don't take half to a long time to explain

them. Others of them take a little bit longer. Some of them are

warnings on things not to do, and some of them are actually the last

three are miracles that happen and in your life when you fulfill your life mission.

So let's get right into it. Number one, My life mission will

come through God's word. That's first thing I want you to write down.

My life mission will come through God's word. It doesn't come from reading a

magazine. It doesn't come from watching TV, it doesn't come from talking with

friends. It comes from God's word. Now, a lot of people make

up a mission for their life because everybody wants to have a cause to live

for. So they got and say, this is a good cause. That's

what I'm going to give my life to. That's better than nothing. But

you're never going to be ultimately fulfilled by just a cause you picked to get

interested in, because you're going to put your head down at night and you're

going to go there's got to be mortal life than this, because there is.

You were made for a uniquely designed mission that only you can do.

Studies have shown that the average human being has between six hundred and seven hundred

talents. You do. You have between six hundred and seven hundred talents,

most of them you've never used. You might only be able to name ten

talents in your life that you say I'm good at this, but you have

between six hundred and seven hundred. You will never use all your talents unless

you fulfill the mission that God created you for because He made you to use

those talents. Your job will never use all your talent. Your career will

never use all your talent. So only life becomes meaningful when I get my

message mission from God. Now, and we're going to just go through this

chapter, verse at a time. There's seventeen verses in Jonah chapter one,

and verse one one says this, one day God spoke his word to Jonah,

the son of Amatite. This is how he gets his mission. Now,

how does God speak to you? How does He speak his word to

you through this book, through the Bible. The more you get in this

book, the more you're going to understand your mission for life. God uses

lots of ways. When you hear somebody teaching like I'm teaching right now,

God can speak to you through that teaching. When you listen to a podcast

like Daily Hope, God can speak to you through that. When a friend

shares a Bible verse with you. God can speak through that. The Bible

says, God speaks through visions. The Bible says God speaks through dreams,

but he always never contradicts his word. So we start. If you want

to know your mission, you're going to have to get in the Bible.

Stop looking for a vision. Start looking for a verse. Okay, stop

looking for a sign. God write it to me in the sky. He's

already written it in the scripture. It's here, okay. Number two.

Second thing about my mission is my life. Mission will require a step of

faith. It will require a step of faith. It's gonna move you out

of your comfort zone. It may challenge your prejudices. It may stretch your

mind, you're thinking. It will certainly stretch your faith. It's going to

pull you out of your comfort zone. Because God is only pleased by faith.

Down verse two, God says to Jonah, here's your mission. Jonah,

I want you to get up and go to the great city of Nineva.

Now what is Ninevah. Ninevah at that time was the biggest and most

important city in the world. It was the metropolis. It was the center

of the universe. Basically, it was the capital of Assyria, which the

Assyrian Empire was the strongest empire of its day. And Ninevah is on the

Tigris River in what is now modern day Iraq. If you go to Moses,

right across from Moses is the ruins of Ninevah. Ninevah was a beautiful

city, wide wide boulevards, parks, canals, great architecture, palaces,

temple. It was an incredibly metropolitan, beautiful city. But it was also

a very cruel city, a very brutal city. It was a wicked city

because the Assyrians at this time were kind of the Nazis of the day,

and they destroyed everything in their path, and they treated everybody else with racial

prejudice, and they were not nice people. And there was a lot of

evil going on in this beautiful city. Now, why is this mission going

to take faith for Jonah? Well, for several reasons. First, Jonah

is raised in a little teeny tiny, itty bitty village, maybe five hundred

people. He's not a city dweller, he's not an urban night And God

saying I want you to go from your little town of a couple hundred people

to the biggest city in the world. That's going to be a stretch culturally

for him. Second, nineva is about five hundred and fifty miles from where

Jonah lives in Israel. How's he going to get there? He's gonna have

to walk five hundred and fifty miles. This is not going to be an

easy journey. But more than that, it's a step of faith. Because

Ninevah was the mortal enemy of Israel. The Assyrians had captured and dominated and

enslaved the Jews several different battles and times, and so the Assyrians hated Israel,

and Israel hated the Assyrians. And they were mortal enemies. They were

political enemies, they were religious enemies, they were racial enemies. They did

not like each other. And on top of that, Jonah is just prejudiced.

He's a nationalist. He goes, I believe in my country and nobody

else's, and I don't want to go help those people. They're the enemy.

I don't like them racially, politically, spiritually, religiously, I don't

like anything about it. I don't want to go help those people. God,

so we got a problem here. Because your mission will often challenge your

comfort zone. It it may challenge your politics, it may challenge. It

may challenge your prejudices. Now Tom's going to come and talk about the next

few principles. But number three write this down is my life mission will somehow

help others. My life mission will somehow help others. So God has given

us a mission to help other people because he loves everyone. A life mission

that helps only me, that's not really a life mission. It's okay to

have personal goals. You should have personal goals for business, for how much

you're going to save for maybe retirement. But life mission is different. It's

about how God wants to use you to help other people. And the truth

of this is when you think about helping other people, God loves everyone and

he cares about people that are in pain. And so in our life mission,

God is going to use us to express his love, to express his

care to people that are in pain. God cares about injustice that's in this

world. He cares about injustice because he knows how it's hurting his children.

And so this was part of Jonah's life mission. What we learn about life

mission from Jonah second half of verse two, God says, get up and

go to the great city of Ninevah and tell them that I see all the

evil happening there, and I won't ignore it. So Jonah's thinking, oh,

that's going to be a really popular message God. I mean, really,

thank you very very much. I don't want to go and then this

is the message that you give me. This message stinks God. I don't

want to share this, but God is having him share it because he cares

about the pain that that injustice is bringing. God loves cities. He loved

every person in Nineveh, but he also saw and he hated how injustice and

evil was hurting people in that city. He hated it. The reason God

hates sin is because it hurts his children. That's why he hates it,

because he loves us so much. When you look at our lives. God

sees all the evil in every one of our lives. He sees all the

bad choices that we make, and he is patient with those choices. I

mean, if he wasn't patient, none of us would be here anymore.

If God zapped us out of existence in a minute we did something wrong,

I'd have been gone a long time ago. There'd be nobody sitting here today.

But God is patient with us in that, and he continually says to

us, I love you. Look at these next couple verses up on the

screen. Bible says in Neemia nine seventeen, God is a god of forgiveness,

gracious and merciful, slow to become angry, and full of patient love

and mercy. He does not abandon people in their sin. That's part of

our life mission is to remind people, remind ourselves. God never abandons us.

And then two Peter three, verse nine says God is patient with you,

you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.

Repentance is turning around, turning my mind back towards God, away from

the injustice or the evilness in my life. Now, God is patient,

but he will not indefinitely delay the judgment that he has against evil and injustice.

So that's why the life mission is to say God has not abandoned you.

There is a way out. That's part of the mission. Number four.

My life mission may scare me at first. It might scare me because

think of this, this is God's mission for your life. So it's because

it's God's vision. It's bigger than you, and that can be scared to

us. A lot of us know exactly what this is all about. It's

certainly scared Jonah and verse three, but Jonah ran away from the presidence of

the Lord. He heard about it. God says, you got to go

to ninev And he says, there's no way I'm doing that. God,

that is the last thing in the world that I'm doing. I am not

going to Ninevah. I don't want to be there. I'm scared to be

there. And he ran the opposite direction. When you get afraid, when

you're frightened the flight or fright syndrome. He is running away as fast as

he can from God. And he reminds us, reminds me to ask myself

a question, a question all of us need to ask ourselves from time to

time, And that is what am I running from? Right now? In

my life? Is there something that I'm running from? Am I running from

my past? Am I running from my problems? Am I running from even

some opportunities that might be in front of me that scare me? Am I

running from the expectations of other people? And in all of it? Is

there some place that I'm running from? God? And so I ask myself

the question we all need to ask ourselves. Is there something God has told

me to do that I'm not willing to do, and I'm running as far

away as i can from that thing that he has told me to do.

When we do that, we think we're hiding from God. Somehow we're not.

Of course, he's so great. He sees everything. It's sort of

like play and hide and seek. Whether two are three year old, you

know, they go, they just hide their face from you in the corner,

and you can see them still, but they think they're hiding. And

we do the same thing with God because we can't. We're not looking at

him. We think he can't see us. But he sees everything. He

knows. Write what you're going through right now. Look at what the Bible

says up on the screen. And some one thirty nine, Someone thirty nine

says, I can never escape from your spirit. I can never get away

from your presence. If I went up to heaven, you're there. If

I die, you're there. If I flew as far as east or west

as possible, even there, your hand will guide me, and your strength

will support me. I could ask the darkness to hide me, but even

in darkness, I cannot hide from you. To you, the night is

as bright as the day. Darkness and light are the same to you.

You can run, but you can't hide from God. And one of the

great lessons of life I'm still learning this one is when I get afraid,

I run to God. I don't run away from God. Jonah made that

mistake. He tried to run away from God, and you can do that.

God will let you do that and his patience. You can try to

run away from God for the rest of your life, but then you're going

to run into number five. Number five is running from my mission. It

causes bad consequences. Running from my mission causes bad consequences. So God says

to Jonah, go. Jonah says no. God says, oh, there

are always consequences to every decision. You see. One of the things that

God did is he gave you the freedom to choose. I can choose to

totally ignore God with my life. I want to. I don't have to

love God, I don't have to obey God. I don't have to even

acknowledge God. I can pretend God doesn't exist. God gives you that choice

and gives me that choice. Why because He wanted people who voluntarily love him

not have to love him. So he gives you the choice, so you

can mess up your life all you want. God is fine, that's you

know, have it your way, Burger king, and He'll let you mess

up your life. You are free to make any choice in life you want.

God gave you that freedom, but you are not free from the consequences

of those choices. And that's what we don't understand because we think because we're

free to make choices, we're free from the consequences. No, the moment

if I'm free to jump off this thing, I'm free. But the moment

I jump off, I'm no longer free. There's a law called a law

gravity that's going to cause me to fall and I'm gonna hurt myself. What

a fantastic message from Pastor Rick. And now this really is one of my

favorite parts of the broadcast. Letters from our listeners. Here's Rick. Did

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she wrote, I recently came out of a two year period of depression and

chronic stress brought on by my mother's passing. I'm sorry, Debbie, and

she said, it took a long time to rebuild my confidence and hope and

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Well, Debbie, I know that God's going to continue to help you grow,

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