Ep. 058 Five Kinds of Hard

Welcome to the Potter's House Salmon Arm podcast. We are a Bible-Believing Church located

in beautiful British Columbia, Canada. We are proudly part of the Christian Fellowship

Ministries with 3,000 churches around the world. We are a church focused on world evangelism,

discipleship and church planting. Here we will share recent sermons from P.H.S.A. Church

and other sermons from throughout our fellowship. I am Pastor David Bigford and I will be your

host for this podcast. I thank you for listening today and we hope these messages are a blessing

to you and bring you closer to God. Hello and welcome back to the P.H.S.A. Potter's

House Salmon Arm podcast. My name is David Bigford. I am the host here on this podcast

and I am also the pastor pioneering this work for God with my wife Sarah and our wonderful

kids. I just want to point out the obvious fact that it is election week in the United

States this week. We just recently had elections up here. Make sure you get out and vote. Vote

according to the word of God and your conscience. I don't want to belabor the point. I think

that it is important that we all participate in the election cycle. We don't really have

any room to complain if we don't vote, but vote according to the word of God. I think

you know what I mean when I say that because the word of God makes it very clear on what

we should be supporting with our vote and with our time. Put Jesus first in everything

that you do, including when you go to vote this week if you are in the States or any

time that you do go into to do that. Today's message I put together is called Five Kinds

of Hard, the Myth of the Easy Way. We are living in some pretty dangerous times. As

I mentioned, there is a vote going on in the United States right now and with that there

is a lot of turmoil. There are a lot of hard things going on, a lot of dangerous kind of

situations that are occurring. So we live in these dangerous times, times that can be

filled with chaos and confusion. A great deal of this is caused by our society's decision

to leave behind our Christian foundations. Whether it be the common law of England or

the state and federal constitutions of the United States and abroad, the success of the

West is largely due to a pursuit of Christian faith. In the past we pushed ourselves harder

to be better. We did hard things from an early age. Life is not meant to be something that

is static or comfortable. Life is meant to be hard, it is meant to be challenging. The

challenges that we face are meant to draw us closer to God. We are called to pursue

Christ and run our race. We don't really get an option with this. The Bible makes it very

clear that we are supposed to heed the great commission to go out and preach the gospel

of Jesus Christ to every creature and to run our race as an example of what it is to be

a Christian to be Christ-like. So I have to ask the question then with that, have you

ever run a race? I was never a very fast runner, but I did run cross country in high school

and I can tell you it is not fun. The starting shot goes off and everybody takes off from

that starting line, but not everybody finishes or not everybody finishes in a good time.

Sometimes you even have to take a step back and realize that some people are just there

as spectators, not even attempting to run. So as you think about that, let's look at

our text this morning which is 1 Timothy 4 verses 12-13 and it says, Let no one despise

1 Timothy 4:12–13

you for your youth, but set the believers as an example in speech, in conduct, in love,

in faith, in purity until I come. Devote yourself to the public reading of scripture, the exhortation

and to teaching. So clearly this was meant from Paul to Timothy, but we get a bonus text

this morning of 1 Samuel 17, 31-37 that says, When the words that David spoke were heard,

they repeated them before Saul and he sent for him. And David said to Saul, Let no man's

heart fail because of him. Your servant will go and fight with the Philistines. And Saul

said to David, You are not able to go against the Philistines to fight with him, for you

are but a youth. And he has been a man of war from his youth. But David said to Saul,

Your servant used to keep the sheep for his father. And when there came a lion or there

came a bear and took a lamb from the flock, I went after him and I struck him and delivered

it out of his mouth. And if he arose against me, I caught him by his beard and struck him

and killed him. Your servant has struck down both lions and bears, and this uncircumcised

Philistine shall be like one of them, for he has defied the armies of the living God.

And David said, The Lord who delivered me from the paw of the lion and from the paw

of the bear will deliver me from the hand of the Philistine. And Saul said to David,

Go and the Lord be with you. So what is the main thought of this message this morning,

evening, whenever you're listening? What's the main thrust of this? Well, the main thrust

of this message is twofold. We all need to do the hard things if we're ever going to

grow and be strengthened. And the second thing is, is we can't let our age, whether you're

young or whether you're seasoned, stop you. We can all do amazing things if we reside

in the Lord. And so with that, I was reading a book called Do Hard Things by Alex and Brett

Harris. And these were teenagers when they wrote this book. And I think it's a pretty,

a pretty awesome book for any teenager to read. In fact, this reminds me that I want

my son, I've been telling my son, I want him to read this book. And so I'll make a point

of getting him that book today. I have it on my bookshelf for him to be able to read.

And in that book, there's the story of George, David and Clara. So we're going to go through

this, these stories that I pulled from this book a little bit, because I think it's, it's

important for us to get some understanding about what I mean by doing hard things. And

then also what I mean about not allowing our age to hinder us. So George was born in Northern

Virginia in 1732 to a middle-class family. When he was 11 years old, he lost his father,

even though his peers never considered him very bright. He applied himself to his studies

and mastered geometry, trigonometry and surveying. You could think of that as algebra and calculus.

By the time he was 16, he had done this. But at 17 years old, George had the chance to

put aside or put his studies to use at his first job. So talk about a job. The job that

George landed was to be the official surveyor of Cole Pepper County, Virginia. This wasn't

a boy's job and it certainly wasn't office work. For the next three years, George endured

the hardships of frontier life as he measured and recorded previously unmapped territories.

His measuring tools were heavy logs and chains. And George was a man at the ripe old, ripe

young age of 17. So then we come and take a look at David.

David was born in 1801 near the city of Knoxville, Tennessee, where his father was serving in

the state militia. At 10 years old, David began a career at sea serving as a naval cadet

on the warship Essex. At 11, he saw his first battle. At the young age of 12, David was

given the command of a ship that had been captured in battle and was dispatched with

a crew to take the vessel and its men back to the United States. On the journey home,

the captured British captain took issue with being ordered around by a 12 year old and

announced that he was going below to get his pistols. Out of respect for his position,

he had been allowed to keep them. David then promptly sent him a word that if he stepped

foot on deck with his pistols, he would be shot and thrown overboard. The captain decided

to stay below.

Finally we come to Clara. Clara was born in Oxford, Massachusetts on Christmas Day 1821.

She was the baby of the family with 10 years separating her and the next youngest. She

was a timid child so terrified of strangers that she was hardly able to speak. Then something

happened that would change her life forever. When she was 11 years old, her older brother

David fell from the roof of a barn and was seriously injured. Young Clara was frantic

and begged to help care for him. Once in the sick room, Clara surprised everyone by demonstrating

all the qualities of an experienced nurse. She learned better than anyone how to make

her brother comfortable. Little by little the doctor allowed her to take over all of

his care. And with his complete recovery lasting two years, a year later at the age of 14,

Clara became the nurse for her father's hired men, who had come down with smallpox

and then to more patients as the epidemic spread throughout Massachusetts than the surrounding

areas that she lived. Still shy and tibbid, her desire to serve others drove her to overcome

her fears. By age 17, she was a successful school teacher with over 40 students, some

nearly as old as she. This brings me to my first point, which is

things outside your comfort zone. In Joshua 24, 14-15, we read a portion of scripture

that talks about choosing whom you will serve. So in 14 it says, Now therefore fear the Lord

and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Put away the gods that your fathers served

beyond the river in Egypt and serve the Lord. And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the

Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the

region beyond the river or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for

me in my house, we will serve the Lord. This is the first portion that we need to

look at is making a decision on what we're going to do. If you're a Christian, that means

that you're supposed to be moving towards Christlikeness. That's what Christian means,

Christlikeness. To be like Christ. You can't pretend to be like Christ if you're not moving

to be more like Christ. You have to make a decision on who you're going to serve. This

can include other things though. It can include, you know, you're stretching yourself for the

purpose of God, learning new skills, something like public speaking, or maybe expanding on

an old one. You need to make sure that you're going to be able to grow in your relationship

with God. And part of that, a huge part of that is doing things outside of your comfort

zone. These actions challenge us though because they are unfamiliar or scary. But as we do

them, they usually become some of our greatest memories. So there's another thing that I

found here called making our beds in other feats of valor. And this is from the book,

Do Hard Things that I had mentioned earlier. So this is a little bit outdated. So keep

that in mind. I'm reading from the book here, but it says, recently we decided to do a Google

word or to Google the words teens and expectations and see what came up. The results were far

more entertaining than we would ever have imagined. Most web browsers have a built in

Google search box. And as you type in your search terms, it gives you suggested searches

based on terms that are used most often. Here are some of the suggestions it gave us as

we tried to Google teens and expectations. Teens and then it would say drugs or alcohol

or smoking, drinking, marijuana, cell phones. So when you think about this, even Google

has extremely low expectations for teens. Anyway, we did our search, the top result

about teens, drugs and alcohol abuse. Another was for an article called a parent's guide

to surviving the teen years. But the one that really jumped out at us was the article about

teaching teens responsibility by setting expectations. So the two brothers who wrote that book are

making a really important point here. If you set the bar so low that it's not even a difficult

thing for you to jump over, you can just walk right over it. Then you're setting yourself

up for failure and you're not going to grow. You're not going to be successful. And if

you put this in terms of like what I was talking about with the Christian life, you're not

going to even grow in your Christianity and your faith or your Christ likeness because

you've set your standards so low. And Isaiah 41 10, fear not for I'm with you. Be not dismayed

for I'm your God. I will strengthen you. I will help you. I will uphold you with my righteous

hand. We, we tend to fear what we don't know, but as we do it, we tend to, we've, it becomes

known and we tend to become comfortable with it. So if you consistently overload yourself,

just a little bit, what I mean by overload, that's just like an exercising term. When

you're lifting weights, you want, you want consistent muscle overload as you continue

to train because that's what causes you to be stronger and stronger. If you train with

the exact same weight for the exact same amount of reps for the rest of your life, you might

get some tone, but you're not going to actually gain any additional strength because you haven't

overloaded yourself. You haven't challenged yourself. You haven't gotten out of that comfort

zone. That soreness you feel after exercising will, will fade away if you never increase

your weight to your repetition. We need to focus on increasing our weights and our repetitions.

We need to do that in our own lives, like our personal lives, our professional lives

and our, in our, in our relationship with Jesus Christ. And we can't allow for low standards

to be something that just holds you back because nobody expects you to do it. So therefore

you just say, I'm not going to do it. You need to be able to push yourself to grow.

And this brings me to my next point is things that go beyond what is expected or required.

This is doing more than the minimum. Instead of skating by with a C average in school,

it's striving for that A. Basically strive for the A. You might, and even if you miss

the A, you might hit the B. But if you shoot for the C, you might only get the D. This

is something we deal with my son a little bit because he's, he's quite bright, but

he doesn't have the same ambition level that his sister has. So my, my daughter has always

struggled with school, but she had so much drive that she was able to do it and graduate.

And she got a lot more B's than she got anything else. And so we're very proud of her on that

because then we know how hard it was. Whereas with my son, we, we, we battle with this and

you know, on the opposite spectrum where it's like, he'll get a C easy because he doesn't

have to try, but it's like, how much more could you do if you actually strove for that

A. So instead of the do not, a do no harm policy, you begin to live by this policy of

do good policy or the just enough policy. These actions can be very detrimental to you

in the long run by doing the hard things. You are strengthening yourself. You're building

muscle, but when you don't, when these actions are, are, you know, only good enough, then

you are falling short of what your potential is. No one else is going to make you do more

than what's required, but there's always, there's always a better feeling of accomplishment

when you go beyond what is easy and then you receive a reward for doing something that

was unexpected for doing something that was beyond the normal level. And so let's look

at the genius of hard things. If we, as we go back and remember George, David and Clara,

we left George as the official surveyor of Culpepper County at age 17. David was in charge

of a prize ship at age 12, calmly keeping it in a really captain under control. Clara

was nursing smallpox patients and overseeing a classroom of students at 17. Each of them

had clearly used their teen years to train and to prepare themselves to launch into a

much higher level of adulthood. How did it serve them? In Luke 17, five through six,

it says, the apostle said to the Lord, increase our faith. And the Lord said, if you had faith

like the grain of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, be uprooted and

planted in the sea and it would obey you. So the reality is that as we exercise in faith,

we will see tremendous things start to happen in our lives. And this brings me to my final

point. It's a bit of a short message today is things that are too big to be accomplished

alone. These are important things for us to remember too. In Judges 7-7, we see the dwindling

down of 22,000 down to 300. And the Lord said to Gideon, with 300 men who lapped up, I will

save you and give the Midianites into your hands and let all those others go, every man

to his own home. These are the harder projects that require organization or rallying people

together. We're a pioneer work and it's a struggle. It's a hard thing at times to corral

people or get people to be involved or get people to come out to church. But it's still

a huge reward when you see someone give their life to Jesus Christ or if you see a visitor

or something like that. But we can't do it on our own. We have to depend on other people.

We have to depend on support from our mother church or from other churches in our fellowship.

These are the kind of projects that really get you excited. This can be like a big cause

like fighting for, you know, curing cancer or any kind of cause or, you know, missionary

works where you maybe you set some money aside and you try to fund, you know, ask other people

to donate for a church building project. These are big, audacious causes. These are hard

things that you can't accomplish on your own, but God can use them in your life to cause

you to grow. This could be like a passion project that God has placed on your heart.

We have to be able to share our passion with others and recruit them to work alongside

us. So after three years of surveying in Virginia, the governor appointed George to the state

militia as a major, which is a very high rank. Then when word came that the French were entering

Ohio, the Ohio territory, George was ordered to lead a midwinter expectation over hundreds

of miles to assess the fuller strength and to warn them to leave, which he was, he was

able to successfully do. By age 22, George had been promoted to lieutenant colonel and

by age 23, he was commander in chief of the entire Virginia militia. You might've heard

about what he did later on in life because after 20 years, George became the commander

in chief of the continental army in the revolutionary war, eventually becoming the first president

of the United States, George Washington. George Washington's tale of success didn't, didn't

start with him being president or with him being a general. It started with him being

a young adolescent who was persevering through the hard times, even after losing his father

and being able to go out and at a very young age, start to work towards a larger goal.

This is important to remember that things that, you know, we don't, don't always pay

off immediately. In James 2 17 through 18, so also faith by itself, if it does not have

works is dead, but someone will say, you have faith and I have works, show me your faith

apart from your works that I will show you my faith by my works. These are tasks like

fighting sin, working out, doing schoolwork or obeying your parents, daily exercise, the

hard drudgery of life. Teddy Roosevelt went from being a wimp to a world changer. As a

young child, he suffered from severe asthma and was considered too frail to go to school.

And as teenage years, his father took him aside and challenged him to hard drudgery.

And that's a quote from his father, hard drudgery of building a strong body. He spent the rest

of his youth spending hours a day lifting weights, hammering, punching bags, straining

at the pull-up bar. Theodore Roosevelt said, I wish to preach not a doctrine of ignoble

ease, but the doctrine of a strenuous life, a life of effort, of labor and strife to preach

that the highest form of success, which comes nothing to a man who desires mere easy peace,

but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship or from bitter toil and who

out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph. These things are hard because you don't see

much progress from day to day. You may even seem happier if you didn't have to do them.

You don't get praise or recognition for doing these things, but over time you are building

godly character. So we go back to our story and we continue on with David. His full name

was David Barragut, the US Navy's very first Admiral and a hero during the Civil War. His

courage in the face of heavy enemy fire and the Battle of Mobile Bay won him lasting fame,

but it was far from his first act of bravery. He had been preparing for that moment ever

since his childhood days as a cadet on the Essex. Finally, things that challenge the

cultural norms. Act 7 we see the speech that is given by Stephen or Stefan. You could read

the whole story, but it's an amazing tale. And in verse 59 it says, and as they were

stoning Stephen, he called out, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. And falling to his knees,

he cried out with a loud voice, Lord, do not hold this sin against them. And when he had

said this, he fell asleep. These choices are the hardest of all the choices for us to make.

This would be choosing to dress modestly or honorably. This was to say no to premarital

sex holding unpopular opinions or positions like against homosexuality or abortion or

the maybe the most contentious these days, which is sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ.

In the beginning I talked about how there's an election that's going on in the States.

And I mentioned, you know, you have to go according to the word of God, make your voice

heard and choose and be vocal about who you choose in a kind Christian manner. Just simply

saying that I follow the word of God. And because of that reason, I have to align myself

with the one that aligns themselves most closely with the word of God. These are the hard decisions

that you just you have to make in today's age. No matter how old you get, these are

the hardest of decisions. These are hard because these things can cost you popularity. They

can cost you friendship. And some countries, they can even cost you your life. To accomplish

things in this category, we have to care more about pleasing God than the people around

us. Clara is best known as the founder of the American Red Cross, Clara Barton. Her

desire to serve others started when she was 11 years old, caring for her brother, David.

And it only grew from there to the sick in her village to the children at the school

where she taught to the thousands of wounded men in the Civil War and later millions through

the American Red Cross. There's a reason we still know the names and stories of men and

women like George Washington, Dave Farragut and Clara Barton. They invested their teen

years in their teen years in a way that shaped them into the history makers they later became.

So as we close, these stories are meant to encourage us to get into the race, not only

to be at the starting line, but to do the big, hard things in our lives. We are not

called to get comfortable and rest on our laurels. Teddy Roosevelt went on to be an

extremely successful in his life, in all of his endeavors. He led Americans into the 20th

century. He was a cowboy, a New York police commissioner, a military hero and the governor

of New York. He was the first president to fly on a plane, submerge in a submarine, have

a telephone in his home and own a car. He was the first president to leave American

soil while in office and the first American to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for almost

single-handedly negotiating a peaceful end to the Russian-Japanese War. There is so much

work to be done. God wants us to partner with him. He's not asking us to help him because

he needs it, but because through our service we are with him. We grow closer to God when

we serve his purpose. When we serve despite it being uncomfortable, we glorify God. When

we serve him by striving to do our best, it blesses him and shows him honor. When we partner

together in fellowship to do the big things, he blesses us. And the big things can happen

in his name. And when we battle in the quiet places, we trust him to help us as we contend

for our own sanctification. When we choose to obey because it shows our example to the

world, God is glorified. Lastly, when we are willing to stand for God's values and God's

cultural norms in the face of persecution and ridicule, God has made king in our lives

and the Savior truly does live in us and we in him. If I could have every head bowed,

every eye closed wherever you are, as long as you're safe, we just want to bring this

to an end. Something we do every time, every podcast, every service I preach is we give

an invitation. It's a very simple thing. If this message has impacted you and you know

your heart is not right with God, but you want to get right, I just want you to signify

that with an uplifted hand. And if you did that, if you rose your hand, I want you now

to repeat after me, Dear Lord God, I know that I'm a sinner, but I know that you sent

your son Jesus Christ and he died for my sins. I repent of my sin. I turn away from it and

I accept you Lord Jesus as my Lord and Savior. In Jesus name and everybody said, Amen. A

simple prayer. If you'd said it and you meant it, I'm sure you can feel a difference. A

weight being lifted off your shoulders. And it's a powerful thing. Your name is written

in the Lamb's Book of Life, but there are there are next steps, not for salvation, but

for sanctification. And that's simply come to church. Come and visit us here in Sam and

are right above the Bank of Montreal downtown. Not hard to find, but also get a get the get

a Bible. If you need one, reach out, download the you version app, which I use. It's very,

very useful. Get in the word and pray cry out, talk to your God. Talk to your God. I

want to thank you for listening to me in this message. I want to thank you for listening

this podcast. I hope that it has impacted you and I'd like you to like it, share it,

subscribe, all that kind of stuff, whether you're we're on Apple and Spotify and I heart,

you name it. I want to thank you again for listening. I thank you for listening to that

P. H. S. A. Potter's House salmon arm podcast. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Potter's

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